tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28978801108655437692024-03-19T05:46:10.901-07:00Using Informational TextTo Teach LiteratureUsing Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.comBlogger120125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-78450750677610467942023-02-24T09:56:00.001-08:002023-02-24T09:56:18.086-08:00The revolutionary potential of ChatGPT?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH53BgXZplVsNLPo-3sU1LdX8G47SSQXET-IIPfkjatbNFJah18tjjdNFHWpjQhTmfuN9hlNree82NtFc5a-KT0oAYGvszMaFsIDbqpftW9XC64Omx4ihFEvZ4PDqj9AKEpfbBqOP7DgIPi64_3MxNe5meMzU7JiKrHFFkoAVGbb4wLwqnFQBkYf9M4g/s1316/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-24%20at%2012.04.59%20PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1010" data-original-width="1316" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH53BgXZplVsNLPo-3sU1LdX8G47SSQXET-IIPfkjatbNFJah18tjjdNFHWpjQhTmfuN9hlNree82NtFc5a-KT0oAYGvszMaFsIDbqpftW9XC64Omx4ihFEvZ4PDqj9AKEpfbBqOP7DgIPi64_3MxNe5meMzU7JiKrHFFkoAVGbb4wLwqnFQBkYf9M4g/w359-h277/Screen%20Shot%202023-02-24%20at%2012.04.59%20PM.png" width="359" /></a></div><br />Audrey Fisch recently published <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d332ec56eb1180001114470/t/63f3f30bbacaa63f8dfac5cc/1676931851454/ChatGPT+has+revolutionary+potential+for+college+students.pdf">a piece in the Star Ledger about ChatGPT</a>.<br /><br />Drawing on her work with students at New Jersey City University and in the college access and success program, <a href="https://www.morethanbootstraps.org/">More Than Bootstraps</a>, Fisch explores what she calls the “revolutionary potential” of ChatGPT to help first-generation college students navigate the college application process and advocate for themselves in the alien and often baffling world of higher education. She also reminds us that new literacy technologies, from the pencil eraser to ChatGPT, have always posed challenges to writing instruction and ponders the kind of social change this new technology may or may not engender.<p> </p>Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-31095996277184847482021-06-27T12:18:00.000-07:002021-06-27T12:19:00.751-07:00An eye cream to revive your teaching of Gatsby?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglDPAE0UKEGxtX1_ELWjj9ORDJyFqkvp3i621I2eWMKkPoSYiyUkbOn2rmwVSQbEsyxhM6QAoGhF69jSKYWtQJz8xD0B9kZnQiPMRG0pFx9W9onOYCa2dviB0qoxotx_baClTwqh6dnFze/s1050/Screen+Shot+2021-06-27+at+3.11.56+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="852" data-original-width="1050" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglDPAE0UKEGxtX1_ELWjj9ORDJyFqkvp3i621I2eWMKkPoSYiyUkbOn2rmwVSQbEsyxhM6QAoGhF69jSKYWtQJz8xD0B9kZnQiPMRG0pFx9W9onOYCa2dviB0qoxotx_baClTwqh6dnFze/w320-h260/Screen+Shot+2021-06-27+at+3.11.56+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Just as I was about to close the books on this unprecedented school year, a Facebook ad caught my eye that I immediately screenshotted and forwarded to Audrey. This is not so unusual; we are always on the lookout for text connections that can help teachers enliven their teaching of the most commonly taught texts – especially <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/mockingbird" target="_blank"><i>Mockingbird</i></a>, <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/raisininthesun" target="_blank"><i>A Raisin in the Sun</i></a>, <a href="https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Using-Informational-Text-To-Teach-Literature" target="_blank"><i>Speak</i></a>, and of course <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby"><i>Gatsby</i></a>. But this ad for <a href="https://gatsbycos.com/" target="_blank">Gatsby New York Ultimate Reviving Eye Cream</a> was puzzling. In fact, for me, as an English teacher, it was quite provoking. <br /><br /> We have all become accustomed to cookies and algorithms personalizing ads for us. Was I seeing this ad because I’m an English teacher? Because Audrey and I have <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby" target="_blank">written and presented about teaching <i>Gatsby</i></a>? Because I’m an exhausted educator at the end of an endlessly challenging school year whose eyes clearly need reviving? These questions remain unanswered, however, as I remain stuck on my first reaction: Gatsby? Eye cream? <br /><br /> Clicking on the ad took me to the product website where everything about it seemed genuine and oddly devoid of any reference to <i>The Great Gatsby</i> or the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that famously loom over the valley of ashes in Fitzgerald’s novel. That said, the tone of the marketing copy, which promises to restore youthful appearance around the eyes and enable customers to “look more graceful with age,” is reminiscent of the exuberant claims that ads in the 1920s made for various powders and elixirs. And the yearning to reclaim something lost in youth and deemed necessary for future happiness certainly aligns with the novel’s themes. <br /><br /> While reading the website, I couldn’t help wondering what Daisy would make of its exhortations: “Every woman looks her best when she’s happy. … Gatsby eye creams are designed to give you that look of health, vitality, happiness and joy.” Perhaps middle-aged Daisy would seek out such a product? (A marketing email I received from the company was sent by a Daisy Aston?!) <br /><br /> It is intriguing to wonder what students might make of this product and its website as texts to consider alongside <i>Gatsby</i>. We often encourage students to look out for pop culture references to canonical works, in part to prove the relevance of what we teach. A teacher might use Gatsby New York Ultimate Reviving Eye Cream as a model or part of a cluster of such contemporary <i>Gatsby</i> references and give students the opportunity to think critically about the ways in which these references intersect – interestingly, engagingly, oddly – with the novel. Or we might use it as an entry point for comparing the advertising rhetoric of today with that of the 1920s. <br /><br /> Later in the summer, I might flesh this out into an actual lesson, but for now, I’m going to leave it there because, though part of my brain is already racing ahead to think about what new, better things I can do in the fall, the rest of me – including my eyes – needs to rest and let go of a school year that required us to “beat on … ceaselessly.” We hope you are doing the same. <br /><br />I didn’t buy the cream.Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-28989807807283497842021-03-30T14:14:00.002-07:002021-03-30T14:14:34.778-07:00Tell Me Who You Are: Windows and mirrors for our students and ourselves<p><br /><b>Thinking of the works we read with our students as “windows and mirrors” has become a popular way of conceptualizing why and how we diversify our curricula</b>, <a href="https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/curriculum-as-window-and-mirror" target="_blank">thanks to Emily Style who named the concept in 1988</a>. In “Curriculum as Window and Mirror,” she wrote:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4ZwNGvB9wTpVV-WZDwNL5UgW8fE-yynIN1Bb7cQrAif-Clx4EC56go6tLoewfIea01ADDBLxi-7hY0ACk23o3WlFxEdxRChB-efwRINmFh_acF5VKR6ru06yKQD2aWZAmA6J_nULtqfJj/s1280/1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1114" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4ZwNGvB9wTpVV-WZDwNL5UgW8fE-yynIN1Bb7cQrAif-Clx4EC56go6tLoewfIea01ADDBLxi-7hY0ACk23o3WlFxEdxRChB-efwRINmFh_acF5VKR6ru06yKQD2aWZAmA6J_nULtqfJj/w278-h320/1.png" width="278" /></a></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">… [S]tudents’ educational diet is not balanced if they see themselves in the mirror all the time. Likewise, democracy’s school curriculum is unbalanced if a black student sits in school, year after year, forced to look through the window upon the (validated) experiences of white others while seldom, if ever, having the central mirror held up to the particularities of her or his own experience. Such racial imbalance is harmful as well to white students whose seeing of humanity’s different realities is also profoundly obscured.</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><b>Through the work of individual teachers, teachers working collaboratively with colleagues, groups like <a href="https://disrupttexts.org/" target="_blank">DisruptTexts</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/projectlitcommunity/" target="_blank">ProjectLit</a>, and <a href="https://ncte.org/statement/expandingopportun/">professional organizations like NCTE</a>, our curricula are becoming more diverse.</b> In addition, we continue to ask ourselves how we use texts in our classrooms, given the disparate teaching contexts each of us faces, the students we are teaching, and the events of the world swirling around us. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>While we turn to works of fiction and their characters to humanize past, present, and visions of the future, <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search?q=empathy" target="_blank">our students still can struggle to connect with stories</a> about times, places, and people that are far off from their own experience or to realize that fictional stories are derived from the experiences of real people. </b></div><div><br /></div><div><b>As we have found, informational texts can help students connect fiction back to and enrich their understanding of the real world. </b>We experienced this when discussing <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/raisininthesun" target="_blank">Lorraine Hansberry’s <i>A Raisin in the Sun</i></a> with Susan’s sophomores. <a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/using-informational-text-to-teach-a-raisin-in-the-sun/" target="_blank">Until we shared with them excerpts from a report by the City of Chicago</a> on acts of violence and harassment toward African-American families who had moved into previously white housing developments in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them believed Hansberry’s play was just a made-up story.</div><div><br /></div><div>Style’s article is helpful again in understanding this:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">In considering how the curriculum functions, it is essential to note the connection between eyesight and insight. … no student acquires knowledge in the abstract; learning is always personal. Furthermore, learning never takes place in a vacuum; it is always contextual.</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><b>The remarkable array of voices collected by Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi in their 2019 collection, <a href="https://www.chooseorg.org/tmwya" target="_blank"><i>Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, & Identity</i></a>, can provide just such personal context for a wide range of works, both fiction and nonfiction. </b>Following their graduation from high school(!), Guo and Vulchi traveled the United States, starting in Anchorage, Alaska, in July 2017, and completing their journey in Charlottesville, Virginia, in February 2018. Along the way, they interviewed more than 500 people and recorded their stories in their own words. Bound together, these stories, each with a photograph of its teller, present a beautiful encyclopedia of the people of the United States, featuring unique experiences, histories, and perspectives that many readers – both adults and students – will not have heard before and/or will recognize themselves in.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Particular excerpts readily lend themselves to connections with texts frequently taught in ELA classrooms.</b> Butler, a man from Montgomery, Alabama, tells the story of his mother, Aurelia Browder, who was the lead plaintiff in the federal court case that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and legally ended desegregation. This story would provide valuable context for students reading <i>Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice</i>; while Guo and Vulchi’s interview with present-day students at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, provides powerful connections with Melba Pattillo Beals’ memoir <i>Warriors Don’t Cry</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Louise from Seattle tells of being interned with her family, and all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, just six months before she was supposed to graduate from high school. While she shares her experience of the concentration camps, she also talks about her life afterward and how she feels about being an American now. Louise’s story is an obvious complement to <i>Farewell to Manzanar</i>. The story of Claudette, a rising chef from Chula Vista, California, meanwhile, provides a real-life role-model similar to the heroine of Elizabeth Acevedo’s <i>With the Fire on High</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Tell Me Who You Are</i> provides a wealth of windows and mirrors that allow readers to see aspects of ourselves in others and to see how each of our identities shapes our views and experiences of the world. </b>Each story is short, usually 2-3 pages, so it can be easily accessed once a week or so, allowing students to meet new people and consider their way of living in the world. This collection is also a very human and accessible illustration of intersectionality, a concept Guo and Vulchi return to frequently as they narrate their journey as two young BIPOC women talking to people all around the United States. (<a href="https://www.chooseorg.org/for-educators" target="_blank">The website of CHOOSE</a>, the racial literacy organization they founded, also provides a rich array of resources, including profiles of teachers and K-12 lesson plans across all disciplines.)</div><div><br /></div><div><b><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkw0HC9q8Qf6-TyJW2thSAtYWvJ8itZWqP5owf-aJXqyP7nIiv2RKHGUVcUBk-1YlwWi9F4TVi5u0URIAZ83IsIibiCbqzjSubniCGG01zjsKjMpmV_aCBIoGp1Ewgi68Mb3DKS0-ve4B6/s504/IMG_0382.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="504" data-original-width="360" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkw0HC9q8Qf6-TyJW2thSAtYWvJ8itZWqP5owf-aJXqyP7nIiv2RKHGUVcUBk-1YlwWi9F4TVi5u0URIAZ83IsIibiCbqzjSubniCGG01zjsKjMpmV_aCBIoGp1Ewgi68Mb3DKS0-ve4B6/w185-h259/IMG_0382.JPG" width="185" /></a></div><br />Finally, as we began writing this, we shared in the widespread tributes to Beverly Clearly, who passed away this week, at the age of 104.</b> In her honor, let us continue to give our students opportunities to read stories they can see themselves in, to encourage them to “<a href="https://lithub.com/how-ramona-quimby-taught-a-generation-of-girls-to-embrace-brashness/" target="_blank">embrace their too much-ness</a>,” and to write the books that they want to read. And let’s continue to create the ELA classrooms we and our students need and want.</div>Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-55798539535427101122021-03-24T16:41:00.000-07:002021-03-24T16:41:08.678-07:00Reparations and A Raisin in the Sun<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVDXBXWxOFnN_vAwHC3N1EdEZCLQmUllXEEGLbJ6jWT7iQn02Gzo_ZbF1qU7tNfuqigWaUWh1gXBjuZXpsBE7nYJ7APOJH6qQFgRsOtgcqgp7-H9ERoATySUlRCdpk4nqFNSIgzYHtGcHw/s1501/UsingInformationalText_Raisin_crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1501" data-original-width="1066" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVDXBXWxOFnN_vAwHC3N1EdEZCLQmUllXEEGLbJ6jWT7iQn02Gzo_ZbF1qU7tNfuqigWaUWh1gXBjuZXpsBE7nYJ7APOJH6qQFgRsOtgcqgp7-H9ERoATySUlRCdpk4nqFNSIgzYHtGcHw/s320/UsingInformationalText_Raisin_crop.jpg" /></a>Over this last year, we’ve watched as the COVID-19 pandemic
has exacerbated the many forms of inequity that shape the lives of our
students. Looking back, <b>we find strength and hope in the new things we’ve
learned with our students and the emerging efforts to redress historic wrongs.</b></p>
<p><b>This past week brought news that the City of Evanston,
Illinois, approved a first round of reparations for Black residents who have
suffered the effects of housing discrimination.</b> This effort is believed to be
the first of its kind enacted in the U.S.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/evanston-illinois-reparations/2021/03/22/6b5a308c-8b2d-11eb-9423-04079921c915_story.html">reported
by the Washington Post</a>, qualified Black residents can apply for housing
grants up to $25,000 to be used for down payments on a home, mortgage payments,
or home repairs or upgrades. This measure follows research conducted by a city
subcommittee that documented discriminatory practices toward Black residents,
including past rules that limited where Black residents could live in Evanston.
The report, for example, showed that despite the existence of a fair housing law passed
in 1968, “as late as 1985, real estate agents continued to steer Black renters
and home buyers to a section of town where they were the majority.” While some welcome
the city initiative, even those within the community who support the idea of
reparations do not necessarily agree with the approach adopted in
Evanston. <b>The Washington Post article does a great job of providing detail
about the Evanston measure and its history as well as contextualizing it within
the broader discussion of reparations occurring around the U.S.</b></p>
<p><b>Given Evanston’s proximity to Chicago, this development is
particularly relevant to discussion of Lorraine Hansberry’s play <i>A Raisin in
the Sun</i>. </b>The Younger family faces just such discrimination when Mrs.
Younger buys a home in a White neighborhood on the Far South Side of Chicago in
the years following World War II. The events of the play are based on
Hansberry’s father’s unsuccessful attempt to do the same, an effort that
ultimately went to the Supreme Court. Our volume <i><a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/using-informational-text-to-teach-a-raisin-in-the-sun/">Using
Informational Text to Teach A Raisin in the Sun</a></i> provides text clusters
on housing discrimination past and present that can help you and your students
understand both the context of <i>A Raisin in the Sun</i> and Evanston’s
attempt to redress the effects of this legacy.</p>
<p><b>In addition to the many news articles written about this
historic measure, <a href="https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/reparations">the
City’s website</a> provides extensive information about the effort, which has
been in the works since 2019.</b> Informational texts include: answers to
frequently asked questions, links to municipal resolutions and reports, and
videos of an Evanston town hall meeting and a presentation on the “State of
Housing in Black America,” in which the history of restrictive covenants and
federal redlining and their long-lasting impacts are discussed. <b>This wealth of
informational texts provides a variety of options for you and your students to
draw from in making sense of <i>A Raisin in the Sun,</i> making connections
with history, and considering historical inequities and reparations in your own
locality.</b></p>Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-89013632661371244602020-08-11T17:42:00.000-07:002020-08-11T17:42:02.577-07:00Using informational text to help our students (and ourselves) make sense of so much uncertainty<p><b>As we move into a new school year defined by uncertainty, it
seems more imperative than ever to try to help our students (and ourselves)
make sense of the world.</b> But with so much going on right now – the COVID-19
pandemic, civic unrest in response to systemic racism, widespread economic distress,
a contentious political climate and presidential election – it’s hard to know
where to start and easy to become overwhelmed. This is especially the case
given that many of the intertwined aspects of the current global crisis may impact
some or all of our students very differently than they affect us. As many have
said in recent months, <b>“we may all be in the same storm, but we are not in the
same boat.”</b></p>
<p><b>But, even amid such upheaval, we have several enduring
things going for us.</b> First, our classrooms – though they may now be partially
or completely virtual – are spaces where we can help students (and ourselves)
engage in the difficult conversations needed to understand and address the
issues shaping our lives – including the disparate ways these issues shape the
lives of different groups of people and why. Second, <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search?q=empathy" target="_blank">literature still provides a safer space to approach such discussions, centered upon fictional events in fictional worlds that prompt us to build empathy</a> with
characters whose lives and experiences may be very different from our own.
Third, putting literature in dialogue with informational text enhances the
relevance of the literary work while helping us understand our present
circumstances with the benefit of new knowledge and different perspectives.</p>
<p>So, when we heard <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/21/893471887/seeking-suburban-votes-trump-targets-rule-to-combat-racial-bias-in-housing" target="_blank">NPR’s July 21 story</a> on the <b>Trump administration’s plan to repeal and replace a rule enacted during
the Obama presidency to address racial discrimination in housing</b>, we
immediately thought of it as a timely update to <a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/using-informational-text-to-teach-a-raisin-in-the-sun/" target="_blank">our units on housing
discrimination in relation to <i>A Raisin in
the Sun</i></a>. This article on this issue also provides an occasion to look at how
government policies can either combat or sustain systemic socioeconomic
inequality.</p>
<p>As the article explains, the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering
Fair Housing rule required municipalities to identify patterns of
discrimination in housing and develop a plan to address them. Such a plan might
include changing zoning regulations to allow more affordable housing. However,
the Trump administration has deemed this Obama-era rule an example of
government overreach that has had a “devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban
[sic] areas,” according to a June 30 tweet by Trump.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw3rNERcJpzXDQC0mhrrDUzFjRzmQubDsVT1J-xcS7IfFwrBXlR3XENYlZkI4rwngkRah5y0zYFfA3BF9-BHgb0NagQgUhZM35R5SqaiDyApVkYO6Dsc4ykS60IFM-8WPI4FvoiicLpHqS/s592/Screen+Shot+2020-08-09+at+4.48.44+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="592" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw3rNERcJpzXDQC0mhrrDUzFjRzmQubDsVT1J-xcS7IfFwrBXlR3XENYlZkI4rwngkRah5y0zYFfA3BF9-BHgb0NagQgUhZM35R5SqaiDyApVkYO6Dsc4ykS60IFM-8WPI4FvoiicLpHqS/w474-h239/Screen+Shot+2020-08-09+at+4.48.44+PM.png" width="474" /> </a> <br /></div>
<p><b>Reporter Danielle Kurtzleben characterizes the White House’s
plan to replace the rule as an attempt by Trump to win over white voters in
suburban districts. </b>She quotes UCLA professor Lynn Vavreck, who describes
Trump’s campaign against the AFFH rule as “racializing the idea of housing” and
championing the socioeconomic exclusivity of the suburbs. A claim by Trump
during a tele-townhall meeting – that <b>Democrats want to "eliminate
single-family zoning, bringing who knows who into your suburbs, so your
communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down”</b> – appears to
support Vavreck’s argument.</p>
<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVDXBXWxOFnN_vAwHC3N1EdEZCLQmUllXEEGLbJ6jWT7iQn02Gzo_ZbF1qU7tNfuqigWaUWh1gXBjuZXpsBE7nYJ7APOJH6qQFgRsOtgcqgp7-H9ERoATySUlRCdpk4nqFNSIgzYHtGcHw/s1501/UsingInformationalText_Raisin_crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1501" data-original-width="1066" height="328" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVDXBXWxOFnN_vAwHC3N1EdEZCLQmUllXEEGLbJ6jWT7iQn02Gzo_ZbF1qU7tNfuqigWaUWh1gXBjuZXpsBE7nYJ7APOJH6qQFgRsOtgcqgp7-H9ERoATySUlRCdpk4nqFNSIgzYHtGcHw/w233-h328/UsingInformationalText_Raisin_crop.jpg" width="233" /></a></div>Kurtzelben’s quite readable article -- especially the
central section, “What does the AFFH rule do?” -- could provide <a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/using-informational-text-to-teach-a-raisin-in-the-sun/" target="_blank"><b>a timely hook
into our units on housing discrimination past and present in dialogue with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Raisin in the Sun</i></b></a> (or <a href="https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/text-to-text-a-raisin-in-the-sun-and-discrimination-in-housing-against-nonwhites-persists-quietly/" target="_blank">our blog for the New York Times Learning Network</a>). The question-based
headers that label each section of the article could also facilitate a jigsaw
reading of it, with a different group of students responsible for reading and
explaining each respective section. <p></p>
<p>In the past, when we’ve discussed housing discrimination
with students, even those who have been directly impacted by housing
discrimination, they were often <b>surprised to learn that the housing policies that
have shaped their lives are not immutable</b> but instead the result of specific actions
taken by people over time. And while these conversations have helped students
understand a bit more about their own world, they make <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Raisin in the Sun</i> seem all the more relevant, and “not just a story,” as one student put it.</p>
<p><b>For us, this has been the most rewarding kind of teaching,
and we firmly believe that it still can be</b>, even with all that’s new and
uncertain about how teaching and learning will be carried out for the
forseeable future.</p>
<p><b>Indeed, this approach enables us to address two immediate concerns
that might otherwise seem at odds with each other:</b> supporting students’ social
emotional well-being and addressing any “learning loss” that may have occurred
over the last stressful months. Indeed, <a href="https://teachershub.we.org/pages/resources" target="_blank">an introduction to trauma-informed teaching
created by WE Teachers</a> encourages teachers to model and give students the opportunity to engage in the
healthy acquisition of knowledge (i.e., identifying credible sources, avoiding
information overload, reading critically, etc.) as a way of managing anxiety
and providing the basis for empowering students to take action.</p>
<p><b>More than ever, our students need us to equip them with the
knowledge and skills to actively engage with the world and its so many
injustices and opportunities. </b></p>Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-15050343982148989032020-05-22T16:21:00.000-07:002020-05-22T16:32:51.967-07:00Using informational text (and technology!) to help our students make sense of this strange time<div>
Many of us are feeling fairly Zoomed out these days, but
there are still those worthwhile virtual meet-ups that rejuvenate our spirits and spark
new ideas. <b>Our conversation this week about using informational texts to help
our students and ourselves make sense of this strange time was definitely one
of those worthy gatherings.</b></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Our conversation focused on four primary themes/takeaways:</b>
1) focusing on purpose and relevance; 2) fostering student engagement; 3)
keeping things simple; and 4) being mindful about the difference between online
and offline reading.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We started our conversation by talking about a documentary,
“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd3gvzk3fLs" target="_blank">Most Dangerous Ways to School: Nicaragua</a>,” that one of our participants was using with her 9<sup>th</sup> grade English students. Susan asked the
teacher how she planned to assess student engagement while they watched the
documentary. She said she had already received some informal responses from
students about the video, but she was still thinking about what kind of writing
to ask the students to produce after viewing. Susan asked what she
wanted students to come away with after watching the video. The teacher
responded that <b>she wanted them to gain a greater perspective about the kinds of
hardships some students around the world face in just getting to school
everyday and possibly to compare those conditions to their own</b>, either during
the coronavirus quarantine or in general. Susan agreed that a comparative
personal narrative, perhaps drawing upon 2-3 specific details from the video
made sense. She stressed that <b>during this time it is especially important to
focus on purpose and relevance and to streamline assignments and assessments
based on what is most essential as we close out this strange school year.</b></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Susan also asked the teacher if she planned to use any
tools like <a href="https://edpuzzle.com/" target="_blank">edPuzzle</a> or <a href="https://info.flipgrid.com/" target="_blank">Flipgrid</a> that would <b>facilitate student
responses to and engagement with the video</b>. This is where we were especially
grateful that our friend <a href="https://theteachingfactor.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Michele Haiken</a> had joined us. She explained the
different uses of the two tools: edPuzzle works well with short videos and
embeds questions during the videos, while FlipGrid gives students the
opportunity to respond via video. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Susan shared <a href="https://tiny.cc/speakconsent" target="_blank">an edPuzzle Audrey had created</a> for their <a href="https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-Laurie-Halse-Andersons-Speak-Text-Set-4918866" target="_blank">unit on consent connected to Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel <i>Speak</i></a>. The edPuzzle featured several multiple-choice questions
embedded in the short, animated video about understanding consent.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Michele then shared her screen to show us how she recently
used Flipgrid to get students to respond to <b>a multimedia unit she had built
around </b><i><b>The Diary of Anne Frank</b> </i>, which included 1) reading book, 2) reading
or seeing the play, 3), <a href="https://www.annefrank.org/en/museum/web-and-digital/" target="_blank">taking a virtual tour of the Secret Annex</a> (through the
Anne Frank Museum), and possibly perusing related material on Google Arts and
Culture. Her prompt for all this was quite simple: <b>How can we take inspiration
from Anne Frank during this time of isolation?</b></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Michele also talked about using a weekly video to lay out
instructions and goals for the week.</b> And she is using <a href="https://anchor.fm/" target="_blank">Anchor</a> to record herself reading
aloud for students in a private podcast, a nice tool that <b>brings her presence
into her students’ worlds while also ensuring all students at least auditory access
to the text</b>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Audrey then shared how she has used <a href="https://perusall.com/" target="_blank">Perusall</a>, a social
annotation tool, to foster engagement among her college students</b> as they
navigate reading in isolation without as much classroom support. With Perusall,
the instructor can add specific questions for response or the students can
simply annotate on their own. The nice aspect of this tool is that it allows
students to participate in a community conversation as they are reading. They
can indicate questions (and upvote questions they share) and they can
respond to or upvote responses they find useful. Responses can also include
images and links. There’s even a
computer-generated grading tool, so that instructors can assign a score to the
annotation work, and easy analytics to note who is responding frequently and
substantively.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Despite our excitement about the many tools available,
especially right now, <b>we all agreed that keeping things simple is the best
course of action for both our students and ourselves</b>. For Michele, this means
using the same four tools. For Susan, this meant going back to GoogleDocs to
create <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cEb4R124tqNW-E8QULHliJgfuHu1gkzhStJ7khH12UQ/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">a guided reading template for a recent New York Times editorial about leadership</a> in a crisis (which you are welcome to copy and use!) that could be
shared with students so that they could add responses to the reading prompts and/or
annotations via comment, which their classmates could also see and add to
(similar to what Audrey did with Perusall). </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Susan also mentioned a conversation she had recently with a
teacher about a <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831016/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby" target="_blank">Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby</a></i> unit. She explained that she encouraged the teacher
to <b>think about her purpose, given the rapidly approaching end of the school
year, and streamline the unit according to her instructional goals</b>. For
instance, instead of having the whole class read both articles in the unit, she
could assign one to half the class and have them read and discuss it in a
breakout room on Zoom or GoogleMeet and then have them present their article to
the class.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Michele, however, cautioned that we need to be mindful about
the difference between reading in print and online</b> and that we need to tailor our
expectations for reading during remote learning. She advocated presenting
smaller chunks of reading and streamlining reading assignments overall. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In response, Audrey echoed Michele (and the Anne Frank unit)
in noting the <b>importance of giving students a variety of choices and not
(inadvertently or otherwise) shutting down options students might want to
pursue about a topic</b>, whether it be producing a creative response or following
up on a particular aspect of a subject, through links or multimedia.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As should be evident from the above, <b>we had a great time
during this inspiring and energizing conversation</b>. Our only regret is that we
didn’t quite have enough people to do our beloved <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2014/01/tackling-vocabulary-in-informational_14.html" target="_blank">vocab skits</a>, which we think
would be easy and fun to do using the breakout rooms in Zoom. <b>If you and a few
of your colleagues and/or teacher friends would like to schedule such a
conversation with us either before the end of the school year, or over the
summer, please feel free to reach out to us</b> at <a href="mailto:usinginfotext@gmail.com" target="_blank">usinginfotext at gmail.com</a>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Stay well, everyone!</b></div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-58677696004099868512020-05-07T12:09:00.001-07:002020-05-07T12:09:51.389-07:00Let's Chat About Using Informational Text During Remote Learning and Beyond!<div>
We hope this finds you and your students as well as can be
during this strange time. As educators, the set of dynamics and concerns that
we are normally in the midst of, especially as we near the finish of a school
year, has shifted dramatically. As always we want to care for and support our
students while also challenging them to expand their knowledge and develop
their skills; however, this global pause brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic
has caused us all to question what that means and what it looks like, or should
look like, both now and whenever we might return to our non-virtual classrooms
and school buildings.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
As you likely have over the last several weeks, we have been
trying out new tools that enable us to keep doing what we’ve done in the past,
and some that have enabled new forms of interaction and learning. It’s great
that so many tools and platforms are being offered for free to educators and
students right now, but it also creates option anxiety, and who needs anything
else to be anxious about right now?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<b>What has grounded us professionally, as well as personally,
in the last several weeks has been the virtual conversations we’ve had with
colleagues near and far</b>, to share strategies and common concerns, and of
course, to offer moral support. So, we’d like to do the same with our <i>Using Informational Text </i>friends.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Informational text certainly has an important place in
making sense of this time, and especially when used to help students make connections
with literature that depicts other times, places, and peoples experiencing
their own cataclysms and everyday lives. </b>So, let’s get together and talk about
how to do this work at this time and in whatever the future may hold for
teaching and learning.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Please join us on one of the following dates/times (click on the link to register):</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<a href="https://njcu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMsd-ioqDosGtJP-gTiFoJFl4jeX84qhIzs" target="_blank"><b>Wednesday, May 13, 7-8pm EDT</b></a></div>
<div>
<b><a href="https://njcu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrduCupjgvH90oQtYWHxBGwCCZ2_nHUBhE" target="_blank">Thursday, May 14, 4-5pm EDT</a></b></div>
<div>
<b><a href="https://njcu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIqce-sqTsoHtyVjwqMY4TojIKDWVAOZCky" target="_blank">Monday, May 18, 3-4pm EDT</a></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Click on the link(s) above to RSVP for your preferred
date/time; you will receive the Zoom invitation upon approval of your
registration.</div>
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<div>
<b>Our approach to using informational text has always been
about building relevance and engagement. So, the underlying question of our
discussion will be: What makes sense now? What is our purpose?</b> We will share
ideas about text pairings in our current climate, including strategies for
leading a whole-class or small group discussion of a reading via
videoconference and ideas for how to use informational text, including media
links, to foster engagement and community.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<b>We’d also be happy to join you and your students via whatever
remote platform works for you to read and discuss an informational text with
you. </b>This moment is particularly conducive to remote guest appearances! Let us
know what and when might work for you. Reach out to us via Twitter
<a href="https://www.twitter.com/usinginfotext" target="_blank">@usinginfotext</a> or <a href="mailto:usinginfotext@gmail.com" target="_blank">email</a>.</div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-61365506193436185792019-10-18T12:51:00.000-07:002019-10-18T12:52:52.988-07:00What You Said About Using YA Fiction in the ELA Classroom<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-J8qMKdDKYuHs4hpS6ddseFMGr7nhfTVvhD3i30dQeIMMkhhDwVSZj25e_xktkZvjcHQbH-_fMsEzYFhWyVzT4SMKQVXhEXbv9wI8Uzl0RINHz7UT2PpLVGtGmItIC6MN8tSXhZkJK5an/s1600/41IXXlDj36L._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-J8qMKdDKYuHs4hpS6ddseFMGr7nhfTVvhD3i30dQeIMMkhhDwVSZj25e_xktkZvjcHQbH-_fMsEzYFhWyVzT4SMKQVXhEXbv9wI8Uzl0RINHz7UT2PpLVGtGmItIC6MN8tSXhZkJK5an/s320/41IXXlDj36L._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
Back in August, we asked English teachers in our personal learning and social media networks for their thoughts on <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-and-how-do-you-ya.html" target="_blank">how, when, and why they use young adult fiction in their curriculum</a>, particularly novels that feature or focus on sensitive topics. <b>We were excited about the opportunities that these texts provide for students to think about sensitive issues. But we also were wondering about how we help students wrestle with the depictions of challenging experiences, particularly if these texts are assigned as summer reading, leaving students to read and digest these texts on their own.</b> Below, we share the responses to our blog posts and online survey.<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>For us, this inquiry was sparked by discussions Susan had with a few parents of students new to her school about the sexual content in a couple of the summer reading choices</b> (<i>Looking for Alaska </i>by John Green and <i>Tyrell </i>by Coe Booth). And the challenges involved in incorporating such valuable but complex texts into our curriculum were particularly underscored for us while we were collaborating this summer on <a href="https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Using-Informational-Text-To-Teach-Literature" target="_blank">an informational text set on Laurie Halse Anderson’s <i>Speak</i></a>. <b>One anonymous response made us feel like we were not alone in our concerns: </b>“Thank you for addressing this! I wrestle with the same issue, and have been working with my colleagues to figure out how to create space for students to process what they have read over the summer in a meaningful and collaborative way once they are back in school.”</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>According to the responses we received to our survey, 60 percent of the teachers who responded said they teach two or more YA books per year. </b>Most respondents (80%) said they assign YA fiction as choice reading, but whole-class reading was a close second (70%), followed by summer reading (60%). In terms of which YA novels respondents teach, responses ranged from a list of 10 titles to “waiting on approval to incorporate <i>Long Way Down</i>by Jason Reynolds next year.” <b><a href="#list">The full list of titles</a> was surprisingly wide-ranging,</b> with only <i>All American Boys</i>, <i>Speak, Looking for Alaska</i>, and <i>The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian </i>appearing more than once.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Among the benefits of incorporating YA novels into the ELA curriculum cited by survey respondents were that YA novels are “engaging,” “more relatable,” have “easier language,” and are “written to appeal to students’ age group.” <b>One teacher said that the connections students make with YA plots and characters “open the door not only to excitement about reading (and writing about literature), but also to innovative thinking about the texts,”</b> while another argued that students can become engaged with writing that addresses topics that interest and challenge them, and that they themselves and their issues reflected in the novels.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The difficulties respondents cited included the perception that YA novels “lack literary merit,” and the desire to “balance entertainment with providing works that challenge students’ thinking.” Teachers also noted concerns about profanity and the desire of many school administrators and parents to “shield their children from the explicit nature of many of the [YA] books.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>One respondent wrote: “while I don't have a ‘fear’ of discussing difficult/sensitive topics in the classroom, the difficulty can be facilitating an appropriate and respectful conversation among students when addressing the topics in a YA novel.” </b>Another said, “They are a springboard for discussions of deeper themes and issues. They allow students to experience risky situations vicariously, critically analyzing choices and effects. Students get to see themselves in literature which is validating.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Overall, teachers encouraged others to take the YA leap and “do it.” </b>A couple suggested pairing the YA novel with a classic text, short stories, or <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/text%20pairings" target="_blank">informational text</a>. Others stressed preparation: reading the entire book first and being ready to answer questions from both students and concerned adults. One urged teachers to “let students dictate the direction of the conversation. Teachers anticipate the issues students want to discuss, and even get anxious over things the novel might bring up for students. Every class is different and will focus on different things.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>In terms of the specific issue of assigning YA novels that focus or touch on sensitive topics (i.e., sex, suicide, violence, etc.) as summer reading, teachers emphasized the importance of knowing your audience, including both parents and students. </b>A couple suggested introducing the topics before the end of the school year, if possible, or providing a packet of readings and resources to support both students and parents in discussing the books together. Several cautioned teachers to assign such books only as a choice. Some advocated providing descriptive blurbs about the books to parents without “redflagging” potentially sensitive content. Others said providing an explicit warning about particular content was a good idea.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Several stressed the importance, however, of creating space and time in the classroom for discussing any sensitive topics that appear in summer reading books</b> to help students contextualize them in terms of their own lives, their communities, and society as a whole. As @MissNikkiIn5th wrote: “I teach fifth graders but feel that we need to give kids enough support to fully digest a text with a sensitive topic. They need to be able to ask questions, discuss, etc.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Sixty percent of the respondents to our survey said they had been challenged about assigning YA novels, by parents, administrators, etc.</b> Topics cited as the basis for those challenges ranged from sex and violence to cigarette smoking.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>We were impressed, though not surprised, by teachers’ principled and courageous responses to such challenges.</b> For example, one teacher wrote: “We have a district policy modeled after <a href="http://www2.ncte.org/resources/ncte-intellectual-freedom-center/" target="_blank">NCTE's guidelines</a>. All challenges were handled between me and the parent - the kids all read the books. Why? 1. I pre-teach many important issues. 2. I explain my rationale for teaching the book and the merits of exposing students to the topics/ideas in spite of the objectionable scenes/content.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Another respondent cited the <a href="http://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport" target="_blank">ALA policy on book challenges</a>: “The whole text needs to be looked at instead of objecting based on something taken out of context, and parents can weigh in on what is appropriate for their individual child, but not necessarily for a whole class. </b>The only time this didn't work was with <i>Thirteen Reasons Why</i>. When the Netflix series came out, it was pulled from our school library even though students had been reading it for a decade. The show is problematic, but I thought we would have done a better job of helping students process [the issues surrounding the show] if we had kept the lines of dialogue about the book and show open.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>One teacher offered some interesting reflections on being personally challenged by parents: </b>“I have personally been challenged by 2 parents. My administration has also been challenged. One setting was a back to school night and the parents actually broke out into discussion as to why the books (<i>Tyrell</i>and <i>Kendra</i>) were good for discussion with their kids. Another time a parent said her daughter was a very young 13 and was mortified by the content. She suggested a note be added to the summer reading packet indicating explicit sexual situations. I thought that was a great idea and I complied.” (Note: Teachers considering such a red-flag might want to review <a href="http://www2.ncte.org/statement/rating-books/" target="_blank">NCTE guidelines</a>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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According to the majority of responses, <b>conversations between teachers and parents, sometime proactively initiated by the teacher, usually resolved any concerns, and sometimes even led to students and parents reading a book together.</b> Sometimes principals supported their teachers, while others changed the book; and sometimes teachers themselves opted to provide an alternate text.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>So, for now, here are our takeaways:</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>1. Many of our colleagues agree that YA literature is compelling and engaging. </b>Teachers worried about the literary merit concern (one we don’t particularly share) can pair YA literature with more canonical texts.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>2. Using YA literature effectively requires context and opportunities for conversation. </b>Again, pairings, including short fiction, poetry, or <a href="https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Using-Informational-Text-To-Teach-Literature" target="_blank">informational texts</a>, can be useful in providing that context and helping to shape those conversations. <i>(Please share your ideas for doing so in the comments below.) </i>Set your students up for success with summer reading by bookending that independent reading with classroom conversations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>3. Work with parents, colleagues, and administrators</b> to develop and utilize a thoughtful and consistent strategy to justify and explain your choices of YA literature. And employ the resources of NCTE and ALA as critical backup!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Our biggest takeaway is this: </b>Our gratitude to be part of a thoughtful and brave community of ELA teachers determined to use YA literature to help their students become better readers, writers, and thinkers in a complex and challenging world!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div>
<a href="https://draft.blogger.com/null" name="list"><b>LIST OF YA NOVELS TAUGHT BY SURVEY RESPONDENTS</b></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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<div>
<i>All American Boys</i><br />
<i>Code Orange<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Crossing Ebeneezer<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Flush<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>How It Went Down<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>In Sight of Stars<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Inside Out and Back Again<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Jumped In<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Kendra<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Looking for Alaska</i></div>
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<i>Maniac Magee<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Monster<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>My Brother Sam Is Dead<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Oliver<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Persepolis<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Piecing Me Together<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Speak</i></div>
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<i>Still Life With Tornado<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Tangerine<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian</i><br />
<i>The Afterlife of Holly Chase<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>The Book Thief<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>The Boy in the Striped Pajamas<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>The Cay<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>The Chocolate War<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>The Hate U Give<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>The Outsiders<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>The Usual Rules<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>They Both Die at the End<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Tuck Everlasting<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Tyrell</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-9920829394272375512019-08-15T17:36:00.000-07:002019-08-15T17:37:05.971-07:00Seeking Input and Sharing Resources<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIXYqtL5HKtxjcDRJUnLg6LOBeA2DhccDWjbC03XY2Jysf48ah0UllYBFR2NQNWBuF4Heu_QL1pFydJvmJrWA5zI0iOfDQgYh0Agik3w4xY-CTmd5-uC7ou4hWDqpB-hCDSNx1W9SWHgSC/s1600/UIT+Gatsby+cover+crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIXYqtL5HKtxjcDRJUnLg6LOBeA2DhccDWjbC03XY2Jysf48ah0UllYBFR2NQNWBuF4Heu_QL1pFydJvmJrWA5zI0iOfDQgYh0Agik3w4xY-CTmd5-uC7ou4hWDqpB-hCDSNx1W9SWHgSC/s320/UIT+Gatsby+cover+crop.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<b style="text-align: right;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt;">We hope you've enjoyed some well-earned time to relax and recharge this summer that's sparked new ideas for the upcoming school year. </span></b><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 9.5pt; text-align: right;">We are enjoying working on some new projects, one of which we'd like your input on. More on that in a moment, but first, some resources to help your planning for the new year:</span></div>
<span class="m_-9060064903235224331gmail-m_8519605793905234552gmail-m_7171158441824609390gmail-im" style="caret-color: rgb(34, 34, 34); color: #222222; font-family: Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"></span><br />
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px;"><b><i><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;"><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831016/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNE3mNYbscL_6VhkFAjtY3AluCo99A" href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831016/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby</a></span></i></b><b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">features classroom-ready text sets that support critical, timely conversations around race, immigration, and inequality in connection with Fitzgerald's novel. These readings, accompanied by vocabulary activities and reading and writing/discussion prompts, <b>support student inquiry into questions like "Why Should We Care About Economic Inequality?" and "What Is Tom Worried About--Is Civilization 'Going to Pieces'?" </b>Check out <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNFprL40AFc4yVCa_NNqoVCN5C75eA" href="http://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">our blog</a> for ideas on how to put present-day issues in dialogue with <i>Gatsby</i>.<u></u><u></u></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px;"><b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">Our volume on <i><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/first-volume/&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNGwyZLEi17QyuZHv85_mKuumk5BvQ" href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/first-volume/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">To Kill a Mockingbird</a></i></span></b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;"> presents text sets that <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/sample-units/&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNHnCgOY2BWJot9c3O1O-ouk5J643Q" href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/sample-units/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">examine the relationship between Calpurnia and Scout</a>, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475806816/&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNG0VzXaBjJoNL0CDEswlSgztqrXTg" href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475806816/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">question whether Atticus is a hero</a>, and help your students to think critically about (and to even <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/01/teaching-students-to-read-against.html&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNHfbHYqwwD9J7GKQoTazrB2PZ9vTw" href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/01/teaching-students-to-read-against.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">"read against"</a>)<b> </b>canonical works like <i>Mockingbird</i>.<u></u><u></u></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px;"><b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">If you are teaching <i>A Raisin in the Sun</i></span></b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">, <b><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475821543/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-A-Raisin-in-the-Sun&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNH8iMWsH-S422XqU0-TBxRJch9XMg" href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475821543/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-A-Raisin-in-the-Sun" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: normal;">our second volume</span></a></b> will help you underscore the enduring relevance of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play with ready-to-use text sets on housing discrimination past and present, the violence surrounding housing desegregation, and more.<b><u></u><u></u></b></span></li>
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<li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 15px;"><b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">Looking for ways to collaborate with your content-area colleagues around literacy?</span></b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;"> Check out <b><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475820270/Connecting-Across-Disciplines-Collaborating-with-Informational-Text&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNEgu71UNYORn5j4IPmICaFutlNr7Q" href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475820270/Connecting-Across-Disciplines-Collaborating-with-Informational-Text" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text</span></i></a></b>. This volume offers practical strategies for initiating cross-disciplinary collaboration and developing students’ disciplinary literacy skills, as well as a sample unit based on a science article and an excerpt from <i>Lord of the Flies.</i><b><u></u><u></u></b></span></li>
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<span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">While we love finding engaging connections with the canonical works we teach, <b>we are also huge fans of a lot of the young adult fiction that teachers are increasingly incorporating into their curricula. </b>So, we've been working on a new text set centered around one of the most beloved YA novels -- more on that soon! In the meantime, we've been thinking about how/when/why we do assign YA novels in our ELA classes -- especially those that touch upon some of the challenging and sensitive issues that students often face. <b>And we'd love to get your input, so please <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-and-how-do-you-ya.html&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNHOmRAAxvkP_dcRrTZ8A6fAwb2mgg" href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-and-how-do-you-ya.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">check out our previous post </a> and/or <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://forms.gle/v7HA9aC6TZtNyuF1A&source=gmail&ust=1566001918660000&usg=AFQjCNEoxBZAm1MKfJ5bnR8kj5jtz4yG8g" href="https://forms.gle/v7HA9aC6TZtNyuF1A" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">complete this short survey</a>.</b><u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">Finally, if you’d like hands-on training in our approach to using informational text, </span></b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;"><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/professional-development/&source=gmail&ust=1566001918661000&usg=AFQjCNEa5pTUBW2OsXEhLO-pA_q3hYNyTQ" href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/professional-development/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">contact us about scheduling a professional development session in your school or district</a>. We offer half-day and full-day workshops for both English and/or content-area teachers. <b>If you are in NJ,</b> we hope to see you <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.njcte.org/fall-conference&source=gmail&ust=1566001918661000&usg=AFQjCNEkFXQFPXYj3iFedICSJ_FiEvjGRA" href="https://www.njcte.org/fall-conference" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">at NJCTE in September</a> and please join us <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/calendar/&source=gmail&ust=1566001918661000&usg=AFQjCNH1AnJgCN7c_LmoT2IY_znGgWWJaQ" href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/calendar/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">at NJEA in November</a>. <b>Otherwise, we hope to see you <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/calendar/&source=gmail&ust=1566001918661000&usg=AFQjCNH1AnJgCN7c_LmoT2IY_znGgWWJaQ" href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/calendar/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">at NCTE in Baltimore</a>!</b><u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;">We hope our resources help you create rewarding learning experiences for you and your students.</span></b><span style="font-size: 9.5pt;"> If you use any of our materials, please <a href="mailto:usinginfotext@gmail.com" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">send us your feedback</a>. We would also greatly appreciate it if you would post a review on <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7384088.Susan_Chenelle&source=gmail&ust=1566001918661000&usg=AFQjCNE8OWN-wTmlDhR82sO5NXOd5b_9Dw" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7384088.Susan_Chenelle" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Goodreads</a> or <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3Ddp_byline_sr_book_1?ie%3DUTF8%26text%3DSusan%2BChenelle%26search-alias%3Dbooks%26field-author%3DSusan%2BChenelle%26sort%3Drelevancerank&source=gmail&ust=1566001918661000&usg=AFQjCNFkpAGxzyC3Dm3JS2Di0nPxBXPGwQ" href="https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&text=Susan+Chenelle&search-alias=books&field-author=Susan+Chenelle&sort=relevancerank" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Amazon</a>. Thank you again for your interest -- and everything you do for your students!</span></div>
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Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-86025947782021586942019-08-07T18:36:00.001-07:002019-10-15T17:55:41.463-07:00Why and How Do You YA?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlB-Y3gof0fVhWs5cOWKrmH4Fl06drkB5pVRvJmytc0-1ck9G0r-pdDibZX_Prv3cexeAqfvSfXWTRQ1lsZMQtj1c5b0QuItEb704cxTotoxhxONObgYTJpFejykAAmWyQQ82S27mdzwZv/s1600/41IXXlDj36L._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlB-Y3gof0fVhWs5cOWKrmH4Fl06drkB5pVRvJmytc0-1ck9G0r-pdDibZX_Prv3cexeAqfvSfXWTRQ1lsZMQtj1c5b0QuItEb704cxTotoxhxONObgYTJpFejykAAmWyQQ82S27mdzwZv/s320/41IXXlDj36L._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<b>While summer reading for us often includes tackling at least one or two pedagogically oriented texts</b> (<i>Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain </i>for Susan; <i>Teaching Naked </i>for Audrey), it also means <b><i>inhaling </i>several young adult novels that we’ve been itching to read since a colleague or student suggested it weeks or months earlier.</b> (Consumed by us so far: <i>With the Fire on High </i>by Elizabeth Acevedo, <i>Allegedly </i>by Tiffany D. Jackson, <i>Odd One Out </i>by Nic Stone, <i>Still Life With Tornado </i>by A.S. King, <i>The 57 Bus </i>by Dashka Slater, <i>Darius the Great Is Not Okay </i>by Adib Khorram, and <i>On the Come Up </i>by Angie Thomas (finally!).)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Though we dive into these YA novels for our own pleasure without apology, </b>of course we also do so with at least part of our brains considering how/where/whether we might incorporate any of them into our own instruction, add them to our classroom libraries, or just keep them in mind for the right student or colleague to recommend them to. <o:p></o:p></div>
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At the same time, Susan, in her role as curriculum and instruction supervisor at her school, has been engaging in her annual round of <b>conversations with parents who raise concerns about some of the YA novels</b> (<i>Looking for Alaska </i>by John Green and <i>Tyrell </i>by Coe Booth, in particular) that have been <b>assigned as choices for summer reading</b>. And while she fully supports her English teachers in their choices and believes that <b>these novels give students the opportunity to think about challenging and sensitive issues and experiences that they may soon encounter,</b> she has also been wondering about the fact that teachers often assign these books for summer reading, leaving students on their own to read them and wrestle with depictions of experiences and issues they may not be prepared for, sometimes with no follow-up discussion when the school year starts.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>So we’re torn:</b> We think it’s important to expose students to books that give them the opportunity to engage with and think about experiences and issues they might not have encountered themselves in a fictional space. But assigning these engaging and relevant YA books as independent summer reading might be just as problematic, although in a different way, than sending students off on their own to read <i><a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby">The Great Gatsby</a> </i>or <i>Their Eyes Were Watching God</i>. However, we also are acutely aware – as we are currently working on <a href="https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Using-Informational-Text-To-Teach-Literature" target="_blank">an informational text set focused on <i>Speak </i>by Laurie Halse Anderson</a><span id="goog_2038941755"></span><span id="goog_2038941756"></span><a href="https://draft.blogger.com/"></a> -- of how challenging it can be to teach and discuss these books in class.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>And so we’d love to hear your thoughts</b> – please feel free to add your comments below and/or <a href="https://forms.gle/v7HA9aC6TZtNyuF1A">complete this brief survey</a> about your experiences with YA literature. We’ll report back on all the great wisdom you’ve shared in an upcoming post!<o:p></o:p></div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-34684123548109750202019-07-05T09:41:00.001-07:002019-07-05T15:35:56.579-07:00Guest blog: The Merging of Media in the English Classroom -- A Summertime Reflection<i>Today, we welcome a guest blog from New Jersey English and journalism teacher <a href="https://gerstmediamusings.wordpress.com/">Stacy Gerst</a>:</i><br />
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Admittedly, the curriculum for the British literature course I teach follows an incredibly scripted framework: a chronological, historical approach to the traditional literary works that serve as the building blocks of the traditional literary canon. The problem? I’m not working with the “traditional” students that my predecessors had in mind when crafting this curriculum. And the department is not ready to update it yet. Consequently, <b>the struggle is “more-than-real” as my colleagues and I try to overcome the roadblocks that exist in our relentless pursuit of the profession’s elusive Holy Grail: student engagement.</b> </div>
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From its origins in the Anglo-Saxon period, works from historic gems such as The Exeter Book lack appeal to the average student who struggles to connect to literature in meaningful ways. The lamentations of the poem speakers, often mourning their cold, difficult existence at sea and the daunting conditions that threaten survival, often fall on deaf ears. <b>Put off by the external trappings of Anglo-Saxon life, many students close themselves off to engagement and stop short of exploring some of the broader concepts that transcend time or space, such as the impact that exile has on the human condition. </b></div>
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Back in 2015, I came across a story on my USA Today app that caught my attention with the following headline: “<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/11/04/solitary-confinement-prisoners-impact/73830286/">More than a decade after release, they all come back.</a>” <b>The multi-chapter story, written by Kevin Johnson, follows the plight of Silvestre Sergovia and the impact that solitary confinement has on him and other prisoners.</b> Since 2015, political attitudes toward this practice has shifted greatly, especially when the Obama administration took a firm stance against its use with juveniles. Awareness has served as a catalyst for positive change. This was obviously an issue that mattered, but how could I integrate this into my instruction in a meaningful and relevant way?</div>
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It is at this juncture of pedagogical dilemma and innovative thinking that I could apply the theory and work that Fisch and Chenelle laid out in <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475820270/Connecting-Across-Disciplines-Collaborating-with-Informational-Text">Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text</a> (2016). During a session led by the pair at the <a href="https://www.njcte.org/">NJCTE</a> Fall 2018 conference, <b>they challenged attendees to rethink their approach to the canon and revitalize it for contemporary audiences by linking them to relevant informational texts. </b>The key to this lies in the use of non-fiction, an element that advocates of practical learning as well as the Common Core hold in highest regard (and rightly so!). </div>
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<b>After studying “The Seafarer,” “The Wanderer,” and “The Wife’s Lament” from our textbook, I assigned the Johnson article to students along with several straightforward reading comprehension questions.</b> The article lent itself well to this because 1.) it was long enough to challenge their stamina and 2.) was complex enough that they had to do more than just skim. This is increasingly an issue with my students; very few, if any, fully read a text when they can take a shortcut. I attribute this in part to the efficiency of search engines to “cache” information in articles for them or using Ctrl + F (Windows) or ⌘ Command + F (Mac). (Of course, the impact of technology, media, and screen stimuli on attention spans play a role, but that’s a blog post for another day.) </div>
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<b>But how could I lead students to make the thematic connection between the two? </b>I posed the following to students for a more extended written reflection:</div>
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In the conclusion to the piece, Kevin Johnson writes, “Segovia, meanwhile, believes he has the strength to defeat the demons of isolation and make it to the other side, where he intends to remain this time.”</div>
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Explain how “the demons of isolation” affect both Segovia and the speakers of the Anglo-Saxon exile poetry. Use textual evidence from the article and the poems to back up your claims.</div>
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<b>I needed the comprehension questions to get my students to this point. </b>The class discussion that followed revealed the dilemma that many students felt regarding crime, punishment, the criminal justice system, and the conditions inside US prisons. Several acknowledged that it was not as clear-cut as they once thought it was. </div>
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<b>One student response offered a personal anecdote: his uncle spent several years in prison, and his personality had changed profoundly as a result. “He isn’t the same person.” </b>Regrettably, the change was not in the vein of “He realized his issues, worked on them, and came out better.” Instead, his uncle was incredibly distant, struggled to connect to family, and didn’t function very well in his community. As the rest of the class listened to this, I could observe a greater sense of empathy in their responses to this raw (and rare) moment of exposure. Here was their friend, who trusted the group enough to share this intimate story about a person he cared about, who was impacted by this issue, who was impacted by exile, the same feeling explored by the Anglo-Saxon poets many years before. </div>
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<b>Lessons such as these are the ones that leave a lasting impact on students when they leave our classrooms. </b></div>
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<b>Based on the success I experienced with Chenelle and Fisch’s approach, I was inspired to integrate another literary work, <i>Les Miserables</i>, to expand upon this theme and social issue. </b>Although the work was French, I felt confident that no one would argue with exposing students to another established canonical work. For the sake of time and student engagement, I used the 1998 film, directed by Billie August, and, on the whole, my classes found the story riveting, emotional, and captivating (just as readers and audiences have for years). But again: how could I integrate informational text and content to engage students and connect them to relevant social issues? </div>
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One of the pivotal questions explored in Hugo’s story is whether or not “reform is a discredited fantasy” as Javert claims in the film. Here again, my news media consumption worked to my advantage when a 2017 news article about <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/11/17/beststelling-author-prison-shaka-senghor-policing-the-usa-reentry-project/873228001/">Shaka Senghor </a>came to mind. Sengor (whose 2017 memoir <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Writing-My-Wrongs-Redemption-American/dp/1101907312">Writing My Wrongs: Live and Redemption in an American Prison </a>I have since read and recommend) explores prison life and the parole system in a way that parallels Valjean’s experience in Les Miserables. I created comprehension questions for students to answer in response to the news article as well as Sengor’s 2014 <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/shaka_senghor_why_your_worst_deeds_don_t_define_you?language=en">TED Talk </a>titled, “Why your worst deeds don’t define you.” The integration of both informational text and video media was especially effective for instruction. </div>
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<b>Just as before, the goal was to have students make connections between multiple works. </b>I include a few examples below:</div>
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<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li><div>
One similarity between Victor Hugo’s character Jean Valjean and Shaka Senghor is that both experienced a “transformative” moment. Discuss what it was for each of them and what impact it had on them.</div>
</li>
</ul>
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<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li><div>
While Valjean was able to redeem himself for his past misdeeds, Fantine was not. Hugo uses this to highlight another social issue: the treatment of women at this time. In what ways was she “held hostage to her past”? </div>
</li>
</ul>
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<ul style="margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<li><div>
According to Senghor, in the article, how do laws regarding parole make it challenging for released prisoners to start over? How was this true for Valjean in Les Miserables?</div>
</li>
</ul>
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<div>
<b>I will continue on this journey to create a more engaging curriculum that connects those in my classroom to contemporary issues while getting exposure to the classics. </b>This, perhaps, is the most practical approach I’ve encountered so far and thank Susan and Audrey for sharing their findings and ideas with others in our profession.</div>
<br />Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-28823108535108796832019-07-02T17:37:00.002-07:002019-07-02T17:38:26.351-07:00How Stevenson's Just Mercy illuminates injustice and Mockingbird<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiBvQ2Ot7MV6zLQcb415psvqyrbw0dKdRQXSUs2LjuSca0DhPUM_L4iNjlsHNsk6nZLOJomDnckncrap4LooIpIrQjgO4vPCSl0RdIGseAPVPj6nMLC-DFoLVziAIluFgU-CK1lHJ4fO9C/s1600/just+mercy+cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="296" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiBvQ2Ot7MV6zLQcb415psvqyrbw0dKdRQXSUs2LjuSca0DhPUM_L4iNjlsHNsk6nZLOJomDnckncrap4LooIpIrQjgO4vPCSl0RdIGseAPVPj6nMLC-DFoLVziAIluFgU-CK1lHJ4fO9C/s320/just+mercy+cover.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
<b>There’s a blurb on the cover of Bryan Stevenson’s <i>Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption </i>that compares Stevenson to Atticus Finch: </b>“Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those without hope.”<o:p></o:p><br />
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<a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/first-volume/">As readers invested in thinking critically about the character of Atticus in </a><i><a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/first-volume/">TKAM</a> </i>and wary of the idea of Atticus as someone who “made such a difference in the American South,” this blurb strikes us as misleading, to say the least. Atticus, remember, did not strive to defend Tom Robinson, nor did he do so successfully. <b>The idea that we celebrate this lawyer as some kind of hero of civil rights is a bit odd, no? </b>(Stevenson himself notes this irony.)<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>But Stevenson’s book, his tale of his own work as a lawyer defending Walter McMillian, a native of Harper Lee’s Monroe County, forces the comparison in a way that is intriguing for <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/mockingbird">readers of <i>TKAM</i></a>. </b><o:p></o:p><br />
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First off, Walter, like Tom Robinson, grew up in one of the black neighborhoods outside Monroeville. While this community may have celebrated Lee’s novel, transforming an old, local courthouse into a “Mockingbird” museum and producing a local stage version of the novel, Walter’s story suggests that Lee’s ideas may not have been fully embraced. <o:p></o:p><br />
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As Stevenson tells the story, when Ronda Morrison, the 18-year-old daughter of a white, wealthy family was found dead in 1986, Walter McMillian was arrested.<o:p></o:p><br />
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Walter had a few things going against him. He was poor and black. And he had engaged in an interracial, adulterous affair with a white woman.<o:p></o:p><br />
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Ultimately, all those factors play a role in this horrifying tale of injustice. There’s police misconduct, corruption, and incompetence. Unbelievable elements include the fact that Walter is placed on death row while he is a pretrial detainee. As Stevenson notes, this is “almost never done.”<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>The piece of Walter’s story that most resonates with <i>TKAM </i>is his conviction for this murder </b>(no spoiler: this happens quite early in the otherwise quite suspenseful book). The connection with <i>TKAM </i>is the craziness of that conviction. Just as Atticus and everyone in Maycomb knows that Tom Robinson couldn’t possibly have choked Mayella with his damaged left arm, everyone in Monroeville knows (or should know) that Walter couldn’t have killed Ronda. On the day of the murder, he was at a fish fry at his house, with members of his family and at least a dozen church parishioners.<o:p></o:p><br />
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The ways in which law enforcement manufactures evidence, primarily through manipulating people to testify against Walter, is a fascinating piece of the story. And readers will be engrossed in Stevenson’s discussion of his own journey as a young lawyer and his broader fight to serve death-row inmates and address what he identifies as the injustice of poverty. <o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>But Stevenson draws one scene in his book that drives home the horror of Walter’s and Tom’s conviction – and in a way that Harper Lee does not capture.</b> Stevenson, as part of his defense of Walter, goes to meet two dozen of his family members. We quote the passage at length, with some excerpting:<o:p></o:p><br />
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<blockquote>
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“It would have been so much easier if he had been out in the woods hunting by himself when that girl was killed.” Armelia Hand, Walter McMillian’s older sister, paused while the crowd in the small trailer called out in affirmation. . . . <o:p></o:p></div>
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“At least then we could understand how it might be possible for him to have done this.” . . .<o:p></o:p></div>
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“But because we were standing next to him that whole morning . . . We <i>know</i>where he was. . . . We know what he was doing!” People hummed in agreement as her voice grew louder and more distraught. It was the kind of wordless testimony of struggle and anguish I heard all the time growing up in a small rural black church. . . .<o:p></o:p></div>
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“We were with him all day! What are we supposed to do, Mr. Stevenson? Tell us, what are we supposed to do with that?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Her face twisted in pain. “I feel like I’ve been convicted, too.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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The small crowd responded to each statement with shots of “Yes!” and “That’s right!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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“I feel like they done put me on death row, too. What do we tell these children about how to stay out of harm’s way when you can be at your own house, minding your own business, surrounded by your entire family, and they still put some murder on you that you ain’t do and send you to death row?” (92-93)<o:p></o:p></div>
</blockquote>
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<b>This passage about injustice in relation to a 1986 murder is so full of possibilities for readers of <i>TKAM </i>trying to think critically about Harper Lee’s meditation on injustice in relation to a rape in the 30s. </b>Why doesn’t Lee include a scene between Atticus and the members of Robinson’s family and the broader black community in Maycomb after the conviction? What would that scene look like? What would Tom’s wife have said? How would Tom’s children have responded? How would their lives have been disfigured by the brutal injustice that not only took their father’s life but instilled in them the idea that they were also convicted?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>What Stevenson does here, in a way that Lee does not, is to highlight how one miscarriage of justice is an act of terrorism enacted on an entire community. </b>That’s the work that lynching was designed to do. A lynching wasn’t simply intended to punish one individual but to terrify a community. That’s why lynchings were such public, publicized spectacles: so the message of terror would spread far and wide. Tom escapes lynching in <i>TKAM</i>, thanks to Scout’s disarming interaction with her schoolmate’s father, Mr. Cunningham, but Tom’s death by seventeen bullets while in government custody surely has a similar chilling effect on the African-American community in Maycomb. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/text%20pairings">Reading <i>Just Mercy </i>alongside <i>TKAM </i>underscores</a>, one more time, the ways in which Scout’s blinkered perspective can’t or doesn’t expose the ugliest elements of Lee’s story. But with our students, <b>by juxtaposing <i>TKAM </i>with an excerpt from <i>Just Mercy</i>, we can help our students do that work and see what Scout does not.</b><o:p></o:p></div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-26062110908790471812019-06-17T12:50:00.000-07:002019-06-17T12:50:03.103-07:00Thoughts on Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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We just finished reading the fascinating <i>Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee</i>, by Casey Cep. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Cep sets herself three tasks. </b>In the first section of the book, she investigates and tells the story of Reverend Maxwell. The Reverend, an African-American preacher, army veteran, and pulpwooder, was accused and exonerated in the killing his first wife. In turn, he cashed in on several life insurance policies he had placed on her. In the years that followed, more people around the Reverend died, including the husband of his second wife, that second wife, the Reverend’s brother and nephew, and the daughter of his third wife. Each death was followed by numerous, often contested, payments on life insurance policies taken out by the Reverend on the now dead. The Reverend is a larger-than-life figure, feared in his community not just for his association with these many deaths, but for his rumored voodoo powers. <b>The climax of this section of the book is the death of Maxwell, shot at close range at the funeral of his stepdaughter by her sister’s husband.</b><o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>The second section of the book tells the story of Tom Radney, an equally complex character in his own right. </b>Radney was a progressive state senator in 60s Alabama. His early career was marked by one pivotal moment: his decision to identify himself as an icon of the New South and to support Edward Kennedy (and not George Wallace) for the presidential nomination. Vandalism and death threats followed, and Radney withdrew from politics. In 1969, he reentered, running for lieutenant governor, but he was defeated. Cep notes that Radney may have been not ahead of his time but “ahead of his place” (100). He wanted to bring change to Alabama, but he didn’t end up doing so in the legislative arena. Instead, he made his career as a trial lawyer. His office, called the Zoo, served rich and poor, white and black, and he thrived. In fact, Radney successfully defended the Reverend in the only murder charge he faced, for the death of his first wife, and worked to secure payment for the Reverend in his many disputed insurance claims. The climax of this section is Radney’s successful use of the insanity defense to secure exoneration for Robert Burns, the Reverend’s assassin.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>The last section, and the <a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/first-volume/">one many English teachers and readers of </a><i><a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/first-volume/">Mockingbird</a> </i>will be most interested in, is the story of Harper Lee and her apparently unsuccessful attempt to write the story of the Reverend and Radney.</b> Cep writes of Lee’s refusals of celebrity and conventionality, of her deep intellectualism and curiosity, and of difficult relationship with writing. In particular, Cep focuses on the ways in which Lee’s scrupulous dedication to accuracy, in contrast to Truman Capote’s practice with <i>In Cold Blood, </i>presents unique challenges: an absence of facts, self-serving memories by those involved, and confounding protagonists. Ultimately, for reasons that we may never fully understand, Lee seems to have found herself unable to write this story.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>One moment in the final section is particularly striking in light of the persistent and thoughtful conversations about the politics of <i>Mockingbird</i>. </b>Cep writes of Lee’s editor, Tay Hohoff, and her insistence that it would be “best to convert readers to the cause of racial justice with a child’s loss of innocence [rather] than to condemn them through the disillusioned voice of an adult daughter” (179). Hence the shift to the narrative voice of Scout, in <i>Mockingbird</i>, and away from the adult perspective of <i>Watchman</i>. In <i>Watchman</i>, Atticus is condemned by his daughter as a member of the White Citizens’ Council. In <i>Mockingbird</i>, Scout’s ability to criticize her father’s accommodationism and political complacency is limited by her age and her inability to see outside the world of Maycomb and the courthouse.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>In an otherwise carefully nuanced and researched book, Cep states blandly that <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search?q=atticus">Atticus</a> in <i>Mockingbir</i>d remains “heroic forever” (178). </b>It’s disappointing to see Cep render this simplistic reading of Atticus. Certainly she’s in good company. <i>Mockingbird </i>was received and canonized, just as Hohoff had hoped it would be, as “a redemptive story of tolerance” (178). The film version, probably more well-known in our culture, particularly for those who never actually read the book, bolsters this view of Atticus as heroic and the book overall as redemptive. (<a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/first-volume/">Teachers can find resources for undertaking a more complex consideration of Atticus in our volume on <i>Mockingbird</i></a>.)<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>Of course Tom Robinson, shot in the back seventeen times, does not receive redemption, and Atticus himself issues an ominous warning, </b>not of redemption but of retribution: “Don’t fool yourselves—it’s all adding up [racial injustice] and one of these days we’re going to pay the bill for it.” The violence enacted on Scout and Jem at the end of the novel hints at exactly the kind of bill-paying to come in a society that complacently looks away from the brutality in its midst.<o:p></o:p><br />
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Perhaps Lee’s vision of the South was more complicated than the “palliative plot” (178) she, under the guidance of Hohoff, found herself telling as she transformed the story of southern racism in <i>Watchman </i>into <i>Mockingbird. </i>Was Lee’s attempt to take on the story of the Reverend her way of rejecting Hohoff’s politics and her own compromises? Certainly, taking on the tale of a black Alabama preacher who worked the insurance system to make himself a fortune and may or may not have murdered his family along the way, could not have been a more challenging choice for the author of the much-beloved <i>Mockingbird</i>.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>Would the world have welcomed this sort of book from Lee? </b>The vitriol surrounding the publication of <i><a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/watchman">Watchman</a> </i>probably suggests the answer.<o:p></o:p><br />
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In any case, Casey Cip has taken up Lee’s mantle, and we have <i>Furious Hours</i>. <b>For those of us who find Lee, <i>Mockingbird</i>, and <i>Watchman </i>to be intriguing, complex pieces of the story of American literary and cultural history, the plot thickens.</b><o:p></o:p></div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-80845871325663043012019-04-23T20:35:00.001-07:002019-04-23T20:35:59.967-07:00Interactive timeline tracks changing views of Gatsby<div>
<a href="http://andnewman.org/tc/gatsby/ggtl" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="348" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikAeLoVDVZuqxLhLAwevdB3nHkITiZK7S1PmamJ0yp_oC0mKwliyUtmjB8QTyPyY7dxH81IJ6nETSYi6-JcrUss4r9S0TEkUMw0p4i6ZnO_bw1GF_V-vvKUkzhPE_-tUOfn-CZNOnNSH2r/s320/Screen+Shot+2019-04-23+at+11.04.49+PM.png" width="238" /></a></div>
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We recently tweeted about <a href="http://andnewman.org/tc/gatsby/ggtl">a very interesting interactive timeline about <i>The Great Gatsby</i></a>, created by Andrew Newman, associate professor of English and History at Stony
Brook University, but we wanted to write a brief blog to call more attention to
his excellent work.</div>
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<b><a href="http://andnewman.org/tc/gatsby/ggtl">His interactive timeline</a> allows readers to consider the ways in which “the frames of reference, or
`horizons of understanding’” for Fitzgerald’s novel have changed over time.</b></div>
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Newman’s critical point, which he also articulates in
“`Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Great Gatsby </i>in the 1980s” (published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Changing English</i>, and linked to - outside the journal paywall - at
the end of Newman’s timeline), is that <b>while the text of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gatsby </i>has remained unchanged, what it “has meant to generations of
readers” and how that meaning has been shaped “by these readers’ own individual
and collective experiences” is a <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831023/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby">fascinating lens through which to examine this still nearly ubiquitous novel</a>.</b></div>
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Newman’s approach builds on the work of foundational literary
scholars of reception theory like Jane Tompkins, who, for example, discovers
that while Nathanial Hawthorne seemingly remained a constant in the literary
canon, his position there is not a testament to the idea that his classic work
has withstood the test of time and transcends the “limitations of its age.”
Tompkins discovers, for example, that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Scarlett Letter </i>is considered a great novel at different points in time,
but that at each moment, “it is great for different reasons.” <b>An “enduring work
of American literature is not a stable object possessing features of enduring
value” but a text that “because of its place within institutional and cultural
history” has come to be valued as excellent, but excellent for different
reasons at different moments in time.</b></div>
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Using an approach grounded in reception theory, Newman
examines curriculum guides, classroom editions, and articles in pedagogy
journals. He considers, moreover, how students reading the novel in the context
of the 1974 film adaptation. starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, may have been
influenced by its interpretation. <b>How is our students’ understanding of the
novel today shaped by the vision of Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film?</b></div>
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One favorite moment in his piece is when he discusses a
quote in The New York Times by Robin Leach of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous</i>. Leach remarks, “there’s more
fascination with a Gatsby in a depression, when no one’s rich, than in a time
when everyone’s rich.” As Newman notes, Leach is “wrong”: <b>“there was no
interest in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gatsby</i> during the Great
Depression; it became popular during the post-war era, when there was an
increasing proportion of stakeholders in the American Dream.”</b></div>
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Indeed. <b>What a brilliant reminder that the texts we read are
not timeless, enduring classics that have always been and always will be read
and valued by readers everywhere! No!</b></div>
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That said, <b>given that we are, as Newman notes, <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2016/04/gatsby-and-privilege-of-01-percent.html">approaching the kind of inequality of the 20s</a>, in which the American Dream seems less and
less powerful as a foundational myth of America, will <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gatsby</i> retain its popularity?</b> Will we, English teachers, students,
and readers, abandon <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gatsby</i> at this
historical moment? Or <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby">will this text emerge as an “excellent,” “enduring” novel</a>
because of its ability to speak to the concerns of our current moment:
xenophobia, <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/07/contextualizing-trump-and-tom-buchanans.html">anti-immigrant fervor</a>, and <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-atlantic-how-gatsby-explains-trump.html">anxiety over the decline of white male power</a>?</div>
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Regardless, Newman’s research into the frames of references
by which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gatsby</i>’s readers have over
time made sense out of Fitzgerald’s novel is such <b>a valuable way for us to
allow our students to demystify and deconstruct the status and stability of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gatsby</i> as a cultural object. </b></div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-38754787172289697232019-03-22T10:47:00.000-07:002019-06-17T12:43:11.215-07:00Is it time to replace Mockingbird?<div>
In response to a Tweet by teacher Jacqueline Stallworth (<a href="https://twitter.com/thebigseablog">@thebigseablog</a>) about why she stopped teaching <i>TKAM</i>, Laurie Halse Anderson recently asked her Twitter followers, “<a href="https://twitter.com/halseanderson/status/1106689730652106754">Are you still teaching <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>? Why?</a>” The result has been a vibrant, energetic discussion. We encourage students and teachers of <i>TKAM</i> to read and think about these critical issues (<a href="https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/02/04/duluth-schools-mockingbird">as teachers in Duluth, Minn., have been doing so recently</a>), and <b>we want to celebrate the fact that many of us are claiming space in our schools and/or via social media to think carefully about the complex issue of what we think students should read and why</b>. For us, this is an exciting, important discussion with no simple answers.<o:p></o:p></div>
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That said, we have a few points to add on this topic.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>The most important thing, we think, when considering what texts should and shouldn’t be taught in the classroom is the ultimate goal: We want students to read. </b>If they don’t read, nothing else really matters. And no one should underestimate the challenge of getting students today to read. We love/hate Penny Kittle’s video, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gokm9RUr4ME">Why Students Don’t Read What Is Assigned in Class</a>.” As teachers, we work hard to engage our students with the texts we are teaching, but there is no shame in admitting that this is one of the biggest challenges English educators face. Each of us as teachers brings different skill sets to this challenge. Each of us finds different texts exciting and relevant. Just as importantly, each student, each class of students, and each moment in the classroom can render one text the perfect text to teach and another text a heavy lift.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Next in importance to the issue of getting students to actually do the reading, we think, is the challenge of getting students to be thoughtful, critical readers</b>, who can understand and articulate why reading matters and what’s important about a text. <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831016/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby">We’ve written and talked about Audrey’s first year-college students’ memory of their high school experience with <i>Gatsby</i></a>, for example. Her students had vague recollections of symbols, the green light, and rich people. Some remembered the idea of the American Dream. Few could articulate an idea of why Fitzgerald’s text matters or why it’s worth reading. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>If students can’t articulate what matters about a text, does it really make a difference whether they pass their eyes over the pages? </b>Or remember that the green light was a symbol of something? Or that the text somehow connected with some vague idea about the American Dream?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Of course, it’s hard for a teenager or early college student to articulate why a text matters. But surely that’s one of our critical tasks in the classroom.</b> <o:p></o:p></div>
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Having paid respect to the challenges of getting students to read and to read critically, we can turn to the questions: <b>Is it time for TKAM to be replaced? Has the time come to update this text?</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Perhaps. <b>Aaron Sorkin has tried an update of sorts in his new Broadway production</b>, which, among other things, underscores the links between the current American and international climate of white supremacy and the historically-specific racism of Bob Ewell, Maycomb, and the 30s KKK. Like Spike Lee in <i>BlacKKKlansman</i>, Sorkin uses TKAM to connect the past and the present and to remind us of our ugly history and its many-tentacled connections to today.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Sorkin struggles, however, to do more to give voice to the African-American perspective in <i>TKAM</i></b>. He tries some tweaks, but ultimately, the focus and perspective in his play, as in Lee’s novel, belong to Scout and Atticus, not Calpurnia and Tom Robinson.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Whatever else it may be and whatever it may do in terms of interrogating issues of race and justice, <i>TKAM</i> is not a novel written from an African-American perspective. </b>It does not offer students the opportunity to read a narrative that represents the viewpoint of an African-American writer or character. And surely we can agree that our students deserve to see many different perspectives, written by a range of different writers, in the texts they read. That’s one argument for replacing <i>TKAM</i>. There are many, many wonderful rich and complex texts by authors of color out there, and <a href="https://twitter.com/diversebooks">students deserve to see a variety of texts and authors in the curriculum and the classroom</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>That said, we can’t wait for a revision of <i>TKAM</i></b> from the perspective of Zeebo, Calpurnia’s son, or Lula, the African-American woman who objects to Scout and Jem’s presence in the church, or perhaps one of Tom’s children. Young writers out there, get going!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Such a re-writing would be particularly important because <i>TKAM</i> is such an important text in American cultural history. </b>That may not be reason enough for it still to be taught, but <i>TKAM</i>’s cultural capital makes it a particularly useful text for students to be able to think critically about. For some of us, the ability to navigate and think critically about this text is one reason to still teach it. In fact, it is a <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/01/teaching-students-to-read-against.html">valuable opportunity to teach students how to “read against” a canonical text</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>How do we get students to do that work of thinking critically about TKAM?</b> How do we ensure we are teaching this complex and problematic text well? For us, <b>paired texts are the key.</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>In <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475806816/">Using Informational Text to Teach TKAM</a>,</i> we offer selections to make it easier for students to do this kind of work. </b>A brief reading on entails, for example, unpacks the class politics of Maycomb, allowing students to understand the complex caste system within Maycomb, and why the Ewell’s poverty is different from the Cunningham’s. Excerpts from memoirs by the Scottsboro boys allow readers to think critically about Scout’s youthful and clueless perception and representation of the near-lynching of Tom. Consideration of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s decision in <i><a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2015/05/supporting-success-with-complex.html">Loving v. Virginia</a></i> contextualizes Dolphus Raymond’s drunken subterfuge and reminds us that both in the 30s when the novel was set and in 1960, when the novel was published, interracial marriage was criminal in some areas of the U.S. We also include pieces by Stephen Jones and David Margolick that raise questions about Atticus’s heroism and the continued <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2014/01/using-informational-text-in-classroom.html">challenges for lawyers of representing politically unpopular clients</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/mockingbird">Important, critical work can be done in the classroom with <i>TKAM</i></a>.</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>The publication of <i>Go Set a Watchman</i> created even more possibilities for engaging pairings. </b>We have a piece, to be published in <i>Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-Reading Harper Lee Since Watchman</i>, edited by Jonathan S. Cullick and Cheli Reutter (U of Tennessee P, 2020), centered around Calpurnia and the representation of black women, particularly nannies. Our lesson opens with <b>a photograph, titled “Quaker Oats’s Aunt Jemima,”</b> which depicts the seemingly loving relationship between an older black nanny and her young white charge and aligns with young Scout’s untroubled view of a nurturing Calpurnia. We then add to the discussion an <b>excerpt from “Interview: A Perspective on the 1930s,”</b> which offers a discussion among three now-elderly white women who, like Scout, grew up with black nannies in the 1930s South, which allows students to see the women’s blindspots about the loving, “wonderful” black people with whom they interacted. Next, we add <b>an interview with Dorothy Bolden</b>, an African-American woman who worked as a domestic in the 1930s South and subsequently founded the National Domestic Workers Union, in an audio excerpt, archived at the <a href="http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/voicelabor">Voices of Labor Oral History Project</a> on the Georgia State University Library website. In her own powerful and challenging language, Bolden describes the narrow “chalk line” African-Americans had to walk to earn low wages in the limited employment options available to them. Bolden’s focus is not on the attachment between white children and their black caregivers but instead on the “system” of domestic labor in which those caregivers were respected -- but only within the house -- paid poorly, and forced to walk a fine line of acquiescence and silence. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>When we then turn to the relationship between Scout and Calpurnia, students have built an informative context in which to consider the relationship between Scout and Calpurnia. </b>They are now ready to examine the key moments foregrounding that complex relationship, including Calpurnia’s “double life” and “command of two languages” at church in <i>Mockingbird</i> and the hostile, remote Calpurnia in <i>Watchman</i> who stiffly assumes “company manners” and rejects the now-adult Jean Louise.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Should <i>TKAM</i> still be taught? There’s no easy answer here. </b>But what’s critically important is that we keep asking the question – about <i>TKAM </i>and about all the texts we teach. Which texts should we teach and why? The answers surely should change, from time to time, place to place, classroom to classroom, and teacher to teacher.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Ultimately, what matters most is that we have and continue to have these sorts of discussions about the books, like <i>TKAM</i>, that we teach.</b></div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-44071121216345468532018-12-02T09:00:00.000-08:002018-12-02T09:00:12.318-08:00Conversations about NCTE18: Finding (and defending) student (and teacher) voice, part 2<a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/12/conversations-about-ncte-2018-finding.html">... continued from part 1.</a><br />
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Our session, “<a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/professional-development/events/"><i>Gatsby</i>, <i>A Raisin in the Sun</i>, and Inequality Today: Nurturing Student Voices About Equity and Justice</a>,” was full of engaged, thoughtful teachers eager to think about how we can use these classic, canonical texts to help students think about equity and justice.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHTdfTuhT9suwBu3NcJHhdiU-42SP4D74-vrqDw7Zbde6DyGhINUAWUa9DzwBv4lJ0JtPbEBvslOmd7v7S1D4pHa-SaJNSwXg07EzR8kI4aj45qS04hz85ulkfXC1xKFf_sduUkvQY8i8z/s1600/NCTE18+inequality+mentimeter.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><br /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHTdfTuhT9suwBu3NcJHhdiU-42SP4D74-vrqDw7Zbde6DyGhINUAWUa9DzwBv4lJ0JtPbEBvslOmd7v7S1D4pHa-SaJNSwXg07EzR8kI4aj45qS04hz85ulkfXC1xKFf_sduUkvQY8i8z/s1600/NCTE18+inequality+mentimeter.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><br /></a>We asked our audience members, using our newest favorite tool, <a href="https://www.mentimeter.com/">Mentimeter</a>, to share their thoughts about inequality.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHTdfTuhT9suwBu3NcJHhdiU-42SP4D74-vrqDw7Zbde6DyGhINUAWUa9DzwBv4lJ0JtPbEBvslOmd7v7S1D4pHa-SaJNSwXg07EzR8kI4aj45qS04hz85ulkfXC1xKFf_sduUkvQY8i8z/s1600/NCTE18+inequality+mentimeter.png" imageanchor="1" style="font-family: -webkit-standard; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="507" data-original-width="900" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHTdfTuhT9suwBu3NcJHhdiU-42SP4D74-vrqDw7Zbde6DyGhINUAWUa9DzwBv4lJ0JtPbEBvslOmd7v7S1D4pHa-SaJNSwXg07EzR8kI4aj45qS04hz85ulkfXC1xKFf_sduUkvQY8i8z/s400/NCTE18+inequality+mentimeter.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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We also asked them to consider how often/successfully we were making space for conversation about equity and justice in our classrooms.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghhjm1HH4b2yIBeyEVIIKEVWskaYvGYPW9x5sRfbkoUXQFLvfBPtIsOkNKVsKp6r4n4FCK9wZ5AKm1wO1D355ofTIupTlJklRMNg0iC_rBeWgTk5TOzZZxOl3cwXuUWVOyeTrnXo4Jfb1Z/s1600/NCTE18+equity+mentimeter.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="507" data-original-width="900" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghhjm1HH4b2yIBeyEVIIKEVWskaYvGYPW9x5sRfbkoUXQFLvfBPtIsOkNKVsKp6r4n4FCK9wZ5AKm1wO1D355ofTIupTlJklRMNg0iC_rBeWgTk5TOzZZxOl3cwXuUWVOyeTrnXo4Jfb1Z/s400/NCTE18+equity+mentimeter.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Those yellow and green bars reflect those who are often making space, but not always successfully or sometimes doing so. Only a few (3) of our attendees were confident that they were making space often and doing so successfully. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>We aren’t there yet, but, for most of us, we are trying.</b> In an active and energetic session, full of interesting questions, interjections, and comments from the audience, we talked together about making space for these conversations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>We started with <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby">our ideas about using </a><i><a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby">Gatsby</a> </i>to think about xenophobia and racism</b> (vis-à-vis the rant from Tom Buchanan about the threat of immigration to the continuance of what he sees as the rightful dominance of the white race). We also talked about using social psychologist Paul Piff’s work in relation to <i>Gatsby </i>to unpack the question of whether money makes people (like Tom) mean, i.e., whether entitlement breeds bullying, greed, and unethical behavior. Finally, we talked about using a report documenting the violence surrounding the desegregation of the Trumbull Park homes in 1953 Chicago to help students connect <i><a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/raisininthesun">A Raisin in the Sun</a></i> to the broader context of violence involved in housing desegregation.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/professional-development/events/">If you missed our presentation and want to see more about these and other ideas, please check out our slides</a></b>. Our work is also available in <a href="https://rowman.com/Action/Search/_/chenelle/?term=chenelle">our books on <i>Gatsby, Raisin</i>, and <i>Mockingbird </i>from Rowman and Littlefield</a>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>We do this work because, for us, teaching language arts means teaching students to think carefully and critically</b> about how a text works, about the language it uses, and the current and historical resonances of the ideas at play in the text. Our job in the classroom is to help students read and unpack Tom’s white nationalism and male privilege. Our students need to think critically about the ways in which Hansberry’s play is undergirded by a climate of violence, despite the limited references in the text to bombs and the oddly optimistic ending of the play (in contrast to an alternate ending Hansberry had considered, featuring an armed Younger family awaiting violence as they spend their first evening in their new home). <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>As always, we are grateful that our audience at NCTE was full of amazing teachers</b> – wanting to think with us. One teacher, for example, shared that he felt empowered by our presentation to continue with his approach to Gatsby as a text about whiteness – a text that can allow students to interrogate who does and does not count as white and the kinds of privileges that accrue to and need to be defended by those with that “status.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>It is invigorating to be a part of a community eager to help students think through the ways in which our world is structured by privilege, educational inequality, educational inequality, voting restrictions, and poverty. </b><o:p></o:p></div>
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And yes, we know there are obstacles. Many.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>To inspire us to face these obstacles, NCTE featured <a href="https://twitter.com/mskharmon/status/1063818598588837889">a thrilling keynote address by the charismatic Chris Emdin</a>, author of <i>For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood</i>. </b>Emdin reminded us that that we don’t give voice to students (many NCTE speakers made this important point): “we create the conditions to allow the genius in them to come forth.” <b>He also asked the attendees: “Do you know what an educator is?” Emdin’s answer: “A rebel, a revolutionary, an activist.”</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Perhaps.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Certainly, for us as English teachers, many of the writers we teach were rebels, revolutionaries, and activists. They were engaging big ideas and doing so in provocative, interesting ways. That’s why we read them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And certainly,<b> as teachers, we want to make room for those rebellious, revolutionary, and activist voices in our students. </b>We need our young folks to think critically about the big ideas and help change the problems in our world.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>So, perhaps we traffic in a revolutionary world, but that’s simply the nature of our discipline. </b>We aren’t necessarily revolutionaries. We are just doing language arts. For many of us, that’s what we love about it. At least at NCTE, we are in good company with many, many people who share that vision.</div>
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Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-24939319078129274022018-12-01T12:12:00.002-08:002018-12-01T13:27:15.069-08:00Conversations about NCTE18: Finding (and defending) student (and teacher) voice, part 1<div>
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Over the course of this past week, Audrey had the occasion to have two conversations about the NCTE Annual Convention. Do they ring true for you?<o:p></o:p></div>
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The first conversation was with <a href="https://njcte.wordpress.com/2018/11/28/congratulations-to-teacher-for-the-dream-award-winner-george-salazar/">George Salazar, one of the winners of the New Jersey Council of Teachers of English’s Teachers for the Dream Award</a>, whom Audrey spoke with in her capacity as president of NJCTE. The NJCTE Teacher for the Dream Award affords (in collaboration with NCTE) support for the two winners to attend NCTE. <b>George had asked what to expect at the convention, and Audrey found herself gushing about the opportunity to be in a community of teachers sharing ideas and seeking inspiration. </b>For those able to afford attendance at NCTE (which isn’t everyone), the convention represents a unique opportunity to get outside the bubbles of our classrooms and schools and connect with teachers from every level and every part of the U.S. (and even abroad). We (Audrey and Susan) always leave feeling empowered, invigorated, and excited. Speaking with George and thinking about his plans to attend his first NCTE in Baltimore in 2019, Audrey was reminded of the power of the convention.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Audrey’s second conversation was with Lauren Zucker, a new NJCTE board member and an active member of NCTE. <b>We (Audrey and Lauren) found ourselves commiserating about how the inspiration and excitement of NCTE seems to slip away, in part because of the convention’s timing.</b> Leaving behind our institutions for the convention, only to return for those hurried few days before Thanksgiving, to then turn away for the holidays, we finally return again to our schools in the waning days of November as the crush of the end of the year weighs down on us. Despite whatever planning we attempt, those days away – for NCTE and Thanksgiving – always seem to come back to haunt us: to make us feel overwhelmed, discombobulated, frazzled. It’s hard to hold onto the inspiration and excitement of NCTE, to remember those new ideas we wanted to try, strategies we hoped to employ, tools we were thinking of experimenting with, as we try to catch up and catch our breath.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Surely, the answer to the latter predicament is to take good notes at NCTE and to spend some time during and after the convention writing </b>– putting our thoughts, ambitions, and inspirations onto paper or the computer screen. That way, we can return to them, but at a later date when we have the space to breathe.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So here are some of our thoughts from NCTE 2018:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>For us, the convention was an odd and tenuous combination of hope and anxiety</b> – perhaps reflective of the state of our nation. The first session Audrey attended on Friday morning seemed to capture that: “Awakening and Activating Hope in Divisive Times.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Even the theme itself of the convention – "Finding Student Voice" – seemed to reflect that conflict: a focus on finding voice seems to admit the loss or absence of voice. </b>How did we come to be in a place where we need to pay attention to finding student voice, especially in the English classroom of all places? How did student voice come to be submerged, repressed, or absent in a discipline all about ideas, voices, and expression?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>The issue, even tenuousness, of voice – of free and open debate and discourse – however, is so omnipresent at this moment. </b>We face issues in the media about fake news/truth and our NCTE convention was taking place during the fracas about the revocation by the White House of CNN’s Jim Acosta’s press credentials.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>We ourselves had a tiny taste of this issue of voice and free discourse. </b>Just prior to NCTE, we presented at the New Jersey Education Association’s convention a session called “Teaching Inequality to Encourage Students to Speak about Justice,” which was in keeping with the social justice theme of the convention.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-important-work-of-teaching.html">As we previously wrote about here</a>, our session was called out as part of an editorial against the NJEA convention published on the NJ101.5 website by Jeff Deminski.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwHwFnV-XNvTxS4tufkZ2nrJlnWRdG32RIs0vhwTtXsDsyYrjF1QNn1lN1Go3Ef5dd1ZKOFWpOevl14ETiyiqmu41M1RYwY4g994fsaPyYsp5hy0zq5smr6qZuyQ5ieuvJdDz59YviNODf/s1600/NJ1015+OpEd.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="285" data-original-width="900" height="126" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwHwFnV-XNvTxS4tufkZ2nrJlnWRdG32RIs0vhwTtXsDsyYrjF1QNn1lN1Go3Ef5dd1ZKOFWpOevl14ETiyiqmu41M1RYwY4g994fsaPyYsp5hy0zq5smr6qZuyQ5ieuvJdDz59YviNODf/s400/NJ1015+OpEd.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg83RFj_iYW343-QKbfU-kSWBH1VwYwz5PfJcPO9CFspIlamt8s7zhfIGc56Huu7x2e2xh6B7I_JdhTez1qVX9jBecL8xohEW_bh4LYy-JWs8nPbvxqeNOJu6BagkxWMzX5DxNICvUCvAg6/s1600/Untitled.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="900" height="141" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg83RFj_iYW343-QKbfU-kSWBH1VwYwz5PfJcPO9CFspIlamt8s7zhfIGc56Huu7x2e2xh6B7I_JdhTez1qVX9jBecL8xohEW_bh4LYy-JWs8nPbvxqeNOJu6BagkxWMzX5DxNICvUCvAg6/s400/Untitled.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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There we are, from 9:45-11:15, talking about teaching inequality and justice. Thankfully, we were not called out by name or institution. And we are both employed with relative security. But <b>is this kind of public condemnation for doing the work of our profession as educators what we all have to look forward to in the future?</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Are these the times we face? Deminiski’s critique - why not just teach language arts? – is underwritten by a threat (you aren’t entitled to your voice) about the legitimacy of our work (you aren’t doing the real work of the discipline). <b>These sorts of threats have serious consequences in our current climate, and they diminish all our voices.</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Amid these undercurrents, the NCTE convention was, as usual, a soothing balm, a calming oasis, and an energizing infusion. </b>More about that in part 2 ...<o:p></o:p></div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-6578789030500927062018-11-16T14:03:00.002-08:002018-11-16T15:36:06.170-08:00The important work of teaching inequality, encouraging students to speak about justice at NJEA<div>
We were privileged to offer a session this year at NJEA, the teacher’s convention in Atlantic City sponsored by the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA). This was our second time presenting at NJEA, and once again we found the educators to be incredibly engaged and committed to their fields and to professional development.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>This year, in keeping with the theme of the convention, we offered “Teaching Inequality to Encourage Students to Speak about Justice.” </b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSjAjFowqCrJiHHeg3s6MuD9CeHBgHcFiuR4U_Ff3rR6kYabvXcn63GGir7vo4BSRx4LrnSzv-Iz03teAgidWIw-KLNn5RiVkSYCQoKmIMFrZfTq2dfd4dnDASV8m2hBz3BKVZSda2V5Ve/s1600/NJEA+inequality+wordle.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="462" data-original-width="900" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSjAjFowqCrJiHHeg3s6MuD9CeHBgHcFiuR4U_Ff3rR6kYabvXcn63GGir7vo4BSRx4LrnSzv-Iz03teAgidWIw-KLNn5RiVkSYCQoKmIMFrZfTq2dfd4dnDASV8m2hBz3BKVZSda2V5Ve/s400/NJEA+inequality+wordle.png" width="400" /></a>We opened the session with a survey/word cloud generated by our latest favorite tool, <a href="http://www.mentimeter.com/">Mentimeter</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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When we asked our attendees, however, how successful they felt they were in creating space for conversation about inequality and justice in our classrooms, the responses were less sanguine.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And why? <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyPvi3ncJVV-TU0Q50_wn7excOcYwYsvAlpFkcI1Bzvz3H6QjUl_Np4LxUQh-jgQhK-PlYuBM4XsilrMCO_0Cy28XSpTowlC4CVrTI6qg9d-wsBahiDq2b1CPZyf-_Xe6v2TJMouOIuk_r/s1600/NJEA+obstacles+wordle.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="899" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyPvi3ncJVV-TU0Q50_wn7excOcYwYsvAlpFkcI1Bzvz3H6QjUl_Np4LxUQh-jgQhK-PlYuBM4XsilrMCO_0Cy28XSpTowlC4CVrTI6qg9d-wsBahiDq2b1CPZyf-_Xe6v2TJMouOIuk_r/s400/NJEA+obstacles+wordle.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Clearly our attendees were well aware of the obstacles: lack of resources in our schools, administrative or institutional obstacles, push-back from different constituencies, and most importantly student emotions. The latter point – registered in the words “student emotions,” “triggering trauma,” and “offending” – illustrates the difficulty we face in doing this kind of work. Conversations about inequality that are not conducted with skill and empathy can do more damage.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Yet these conversations, we contend, are more important now than ever. </b>We always stress the important of foregrounding purpose in the language arts classroom. Students need to know why we are reading and discussing these particular texts and ideas. As Cris Tovani notes (2000), it is all too common that without a clear purpose for reading, even relatively diligent and well-intentioned students learn to “fake-read” early on, as she did, and are able to get by doing so all the way through high school (4-5). Unless we foreground the big ideas and essential questions we hope to address in relation to the text (Wiggins & McTighe 2014; Burke 2010), students are likely to have little sense of the purpose of their reading. And if we are going to harness student engagement, our purpose needs to be authentically and creatively connected to the students’ lives and interests.<o:p></o:p></div>
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So while making explicit our purpose has always ungirded our teaching practice, linking that purpose to discussion of difficult issues – like inequality and justice - seems more important now than ever. <b>If students don't learn how to engage in thoughtful, evidence-based, civil discussions in a classroom full of peers with whom they have to relate on a regular basis, then the only place they are likely to see or hear discourse about such issues is via cable news, social media, or 2nd or 3rd hand from family or friends. </b>Our media universe is full of people talking or shouting past each other without engaging in evidence-based, civil discussion. We need to find ways to make our classrooms a different, safe space, where students can practice engaging in difficult but critical conversations (Chadwick 2016) about the troubling world we live in.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In our session, we talked with our attendees about ways to do that work: with intellectual rigor and civility.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Interestingly, in a first for us, our session was called out for opprobrium in the broader media universe.</b> As part of <a href="http://nj1015.com/stop-closing-schools-for-njea-convention-opinion/">an editorial for the NJ101.5 website</a>, Jeff Deminski made his case against the benefits of the NJEA Convention.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnNH6n0y3o6fwJtsGUIC-UwKGzBsdJRHqZWBLSasJ289HVCIzJQUyau8nAkCjL4dbkPquxkEpBcXKnjhVm3RBavLQLlC7wGY2fSAq3lFq5x1Y67mjqgNJopRkLUq7dTcvEwti9LEsEHHE-/s1600/NJ1015+OpEd.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="285" data-original-width="900" height="125" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnNH6n0y3o6fwJtsGUIC-UwKGzBsdJRHqZWBLSasJ289HVCIzJQUyau8nAkCjL4dbkPquxkEpBcXKnjhVm3RBavLQLlC7wGY2fSAq3lFq5x1Y67mjqgNJopRkLUq7dTcvEwti9LEsEHHE-/s400/NJ1015+OpEd.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkpWgqYL5OetP36Gu1vR_tVOCDVyew5qCRShk_FC_dHYMbpJ89fs2SyoGui5u1HPTkBZbfQ4r1eA40cXx2m-aVhquqAZqOxvrnsJSb3pxAPuNZLqIBYFRnYhJ5Q4-cWNnfYod3NDMw-qgg/s1600/Untitled.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="900" height="141" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkpWgqYL5OetP36Gu1vR_tVOCDVyew5qCRShk_FC_dHYMbpJ89fs2SyoGui5u1HPTkBZbfQ4r1eA40cXx2m-aVhquqAZqOxvrnsJSb3pxAPuNZLqIBYFRnYhJ5Q4-cWNnfYod3NDMw-qgg/s400/Untitled.png" width="400" /></a>And our session was caught in Deminski’s net. He wrote:<o:p></o:p></div>
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There we are, from 9:45-11:15, talking about teaching inequality and justice. <b>Why not just teach language arts, Deminski’s asks. We are! </b></div>
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The math teachers are also just teaching math, but they are doing so by amplifying student interest in Moana in order to engage students in math. I suppose the math teachers could teach math without any context or application – as simple numbers. But why would we want that? How would we expect students to succeed given that pedagogical approach?<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>And what would it even mean to <i>just </i>teach language arts?</b> Our session explored teaching ideas and strategies for <i><a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby">The Great Gatsby</a></i>. This is a classic text of the English curriculum, beloved by teachers and students for decades. It is also a text centrally concerned with inequality and justice. <i>Gatsby </i>opens with a rant from the wealthy white bully Tom Buchanan about the threat of immigration to the continuance of what he sees as the rightful dominance of the white race. Tom cites a prominent white nationalist from the 20s, Lothrop Stoddard to justify his ideas. Teaching language arts <i>means </i>teaching students to think carefully and critically about how a text works and about its language and ideas. We need to read Tom’s words closely and then think critically about how they function in relation to the novel. Hence our session.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>We also need to recognize that in 2018, teaching language arts, even with canonical texts like <i>Gatsby</i>, is more and more difficult. </b>We live, as our attendees noted, in a world structured by inequality – by privilege, educational inequality, educational inequality, voting restrictions, and poverty. Even when we are teaching traditional canonical texts, addressing issues of inequality and justice requires more skill and care than ever.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Our attendees were well aware of the obstacles we all face in doing this work well. </b>For us, this session offered something new: a superficial and wholly uninformed dismissal of our work from a random opinion writer. Not nice. <b>But both the dedication of the teachers in our session and this bit of negativity reinvigorate us to continue this work – <a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/professional-development/events/">onward to Houston for NCTE and CEL</a>!</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-85185217656743039692018-10-23T17:04:00.000-07:002018-10-24T13:47:03.799-07:00Finding purpose and politics in Gatsby at PCTELA18<div>
It was very early and very dark when we began our journey to Harrisburg, PA, to present at the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English annual conference, <a href="http://www.pctela.org/annual-conference.html">#PCTELA18</a>. Audrey had been to the national affiliate meeting for NCTE, where leaders of all the affiliates gather and share ideas and resources, and met some of the dynamic PCTELA board members, and we were very excited to get to hear the amazing <a href="https://www.as-king.com/">A.S. King</a> speak, so we knew it would be worth the trip.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It sounded good at the time, but when we had to get up at 4am and drive through NJ and PA in the dark, we began to question why we were doing this! As always, we started to feel energized as we arrived at the conference and left feeling inspired and ready to take on the world (if a little tired). <b>Isn’t that what’s so great about NCTE and the affiliates – how they harness and focus our energies and remind us of the amazing community of educators to which we belong.</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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We presented our <a href="https://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/gatsby/">latest incarnation of our work</a>, entitled for this forum, <i>Gatsby: 1925 or 2018?</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDtg9qplgQ1XPbTyKQftiXC7z72sL-ThiAJkWCTtIGjriTlU6mDF9Tjx1Kr9YbBzm1cq0vpJ_hFyxSw2mVMsAlaVkQx7FQ6M3RP7vNJ31OrHn9ozUMBc8tZYOKBBPHCmMjueb-HOEo1hOH/s1600/mentimeter+gatsby+pctela+wordle.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="391" data-original-width="697" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDtg9qplgQ1XPbTyKQftiXC7z72sL-ThiAJkWCTtIGjriTlU6mDF9Tjx1Kr9YbBzm1cq0vpJ_hFyxSw2mVMsAlaVkQx7FQ6M3RP7vNJ31OrHn9ozUMBc8tZYOKBBPHCmMjueb-HOEo1hOH/s400/mentimeter+gatsby+pctela+wordle.png" width="400" /></a>We opened our presentation with our newest favorite tech tool, <a href="https://www.mentimeter.com/">Mentimeter</a>. We asked our audience the following: <b>When you think of <i>Gatsby</i>, what words come to mind?</b> Mentimeter did the rest, in real time; how awesome!<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>We chuckled over “overrated,” bemoaned the “green light” (Audrey’s bugaboo), and noted the presence of “economic inequality,” “privilege,” and “wealth.”</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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From there, and invoking the conference theme, “The Stories of Our Lives,” we launched into our discussion of <b>how <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, a text written and set in the 1920s and taught regularly in many, many English classrooms, can be taught as a topical, relevant text that interrogates fundamental issues</b> -- past, present, and future -- about our culture and beliefs. We explored <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby">key issues in </a><i><a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby">Gatsby</a> </i>– white supremacy and nationalism, the difficulties of economic mobility, economic inequality, anti-Semitism, and the social psychology of privilege and entitlement – and tried to unpack <b>how to use this canonical text to create space for difficult, critical conversations</b>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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For us, it was fascinating to talk pedagogy with PCTELA members who self-identified as people teaching in the big red state of PA. For both of us, teaching in urban Northern New Jersey, the politics are enormously different. <b>The energy and engagement in the room was palpable; several people interjected mid-session with questions and comments (a presenter’s greatest delight!). </b><o:p></o:p></div>
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We thought some of the concerns our audience raised and our views on them worth sharing, as <b>we know that teachers across the country, particularly in the redder pockets of our nation, are grappling with how to navigate a tricky political landscape while still ensuring that our classrooms are spaces for:</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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1. critical thinking about big issues that matter (and not just the green light!);<o:p></o:p></div>
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2. students to think through and contextualize the drama of our particular moment through the context of literature;<o:p></o:p></div>
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3. difficult conversations.<o:p></o:p></div>
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For example, <b>one person at PCTELA asked us whether we were worried about injecting politics into the classroom</b> when, for example, we focus on the white nationalism and economic inequality in <i>Gatsby</i>. Another asked whether we include opposing viewpoints. Still another asked about whether we worried that students would just give us back what we want to hear. These are legitimate, challenging concerns that are worth careful consideration.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Our strategy is two-fold.<o:p></o:p></div>
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First, <b>we try to think about our work as focused on extracting the politics out of the text(s)</b>, rather than injecting our politics. Of course, we focus on things we care about. And so our extraction, our focus, is of necessity going to change based on time and place. <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-atlantic-how-gatsby-explains-trump.html">Trump, Kavanaugh</a>, <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/06/roseanne-barr-and-great-gatsby.html">Roseanne</a> (some of the connections that have recently caught our attention) produce our interest in how the text navigates white nationalism, <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/07/contextualizing-trump-and-tom-buchanans.html">fear of non-white immigrants</a>, white male privilege, and the anger and entitlement of those in positions of power.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Reading Gatsby in 2018 is and should be different from reading Gatsby in 1950.</b> Isn’t that, after all, the beauty of literature? Audrey likes to think that if anything makes a text worthy of canonical status, it is that text’s capacity to generate conversation and merit scrutiny in different times and places. (But then again, that may be a function of the reader and an altogether different conversation.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj70x4RRbaa2LyDxQF8K1zA37RTp8w7nJu-zV8b6JhfEa0Ww6f0WOHnhooe9qFLzDwy2koHVzBsNvKaBiiRArebzf2_s-qAaQx0FWRi-y9_NuIYoxn0230Z2lI1Mgp2oJnWTc14-2OLvpcK/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-10-23+at+7.23.40+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="394" data-original-width="596" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj70x4RRbaa2LyDxQF8K1zA37RTp8w7nJu-zV8b6JhfEa0Ww6f0WOHnhooe9qFLzDwy2koHVzBsNvKaBiiRArebzf2_s-qAaQx0FWRi-y9_NuIYoxn0230Z2lI1Mgp2oJnWTc14-2OLvpcK/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-10-23+at+7.23.40+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>That said, no one in 2018 can underestimate the trepidation teachers (and students too) feel about these difficult conversations.</b> Yet, as one of our PCTELA audience members asserted, based on his experience teaching at a wealthy, all-male private school with what he described as a mostly Republican student body, <b>young people are eager to talk about these things.</b> If we open the door and ground our discussion in <i>Gatsby </i>and companion texts like excerpts from <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/06/gatsby-buchanan-and-racial-paranoia.html">Lothrop Stoddard</a>, author of <i>The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, </i>(<a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/09/another-source-for-gatsbys-this-man.html">inspiration for Fitzgerald’s Goddard</a>), or social psychologist Paul Piff’s “Does Money Make You Mean,” an engaging TED Talk about behavioral experiments involving games of monopoly, driving habits, and more, we create space for dialogue in our classroom. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvIF3pU0ojojr7DMJYceZc2MtAZfSHGzFT6Q5WWKj0-WbHKu8mgrYb23FYWb5M2_YgH8tPymX49iVSF3XTQTDq4GDKjzsjkF01Q1-TxxXkUu9dAKuKNMiTTc1aRfldSPTSHoc1WzI_XGtD/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-10-23+at+7.24.16+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="645" data-original-width="536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvIF3pU0ojojr7DMJYceZc2MtAZfSHGzFT6Q5WWKj0-WbHKu8mgrYb23FYWb5M2_YgH8tPymX49iVSF3XTQTDq4GDKjzsjkF01Q1-TxxXkUu9dAKuKNMiTTc1aRfldSPTSHoc1WzI_XGtD/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-10-23+at+7.24.16+PM.png" width="265" /></a></div>
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We don’t have to be explicit in discussing Trump or Kavanaugh; for a variety of reasons, we may not be comfortable doing so. <b>But we can frame our discussions of <i>Gatsby</i> and extract the politics from Fitzgerald’s text, so that students have the space and language to think and talk about the big issues that they are seeing all around them. </b>That’s our hope based on our experience, albeit in a very different environment.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>After our talk, we had the amazing privilege to hear contemporary young adult author A.S. King address PCTELA.</b> Wow! Her remarks about the importance of young adult literature resonated so strongly with us. King talked about how she couldn’t connect with the four novels (!) she was assigned in the entirety of her high school experience. <b><i>The Scarlett Letter</i>, she noted, seemed to contain all sorts of issues that should have been meaningful to her, but the Puritans, she admitted, “were a real buzz-kill.”</b> And so she skipped Hawthorne.<o:p></o:p></div>
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S.E. Hinton was another story, for King. (And later, unaccountably, <i>The Satanic Verses</i>.)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Her broader point was that contemporary young adult literature has such an important place in our curriculum, particularly as it keeps young readers reading.</b> King noted sardonically those gatekeepers who say that they don’t believe in contemporary young adult literature and retorted, “it’s not like fairies; it exists.” Indeed. And the passion that so many young readers have for this literature only serves to <b>underscore the importance of our finding ways to make ALL the texts we teach meaningful, relevant, and purposeful for our students. </b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Our work is cut out for us, especially for those who teach in schools where the curriculum is still dominated by mostly canonical and somewhat inaccessible texts, like <i>Gatsby</i>. </b>But as we tried to show in our presentation, it is precisely <i>Gatsby</i>’s staid canonicity that makes it so full of insurgent and subversive possibilities. This is the work we love, and that so many English teachers do so creatively, ambitiously, and thoughtfully.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgghb_-L0jd1m1c-RNb8Cd9379jf6eVTyq6MZsa5mZuVhbQIqhhWHp3LtWjaDrynV1N1QHvmjnOUFnqHDDsWBI3Uk-EzFR8Ot1K3F1QdqwP8B1Z1-OZNcKIn73U4lLbwQGa8VyHPdSB3D-O/s1600/IMG_8428.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgghb_-L0jd1m1c-RNb8Cd9379jf6eVTyq6MZsa5mZuVhbQIqhhWHp3LtWjaDrynV1N1QHvmjnOUFnqHDDsWBI3Uk-EzFR8Ot1K3F1QdqwP8B1Z1-OZNcKIn73U4lLbwQGa8VyHPdSB3D-O/s200/IMG_8428.JPG" width="150" /></a></div>
<b>So, all in all, an inspiring and impressive PCTELA conference. </b>We left invigorated, and on the way home stopped in Hershey for a tour of Chocolate World (Susan’s first time). Sweet!</div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-28698062073659927142018-10-02T18:14:00.000-07:002018-10-02T18:14:35.192-07:00The Atlantic: How Gatsby explains Trump<div>
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If you have been following <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby">our work on <i>Gatsby</i></a>, you know we are interested in the ways in which <b>Fitzgerald’s novel is eerily resonant with </b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.1200008392334px;"><b>many of the issues we are facing at this moment:</b> anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant sentiment and general xenophobia, economic inequality, white nationalist anxiety, and more. <b>Time and again we are intrigued and amazed at the ways in which Fitzgerald’s 1925 text anticipates and reflects the issues of our current historical moment (which may be to say that these issues continue to appear and reappear across time).</b></span><br />
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In any case, we were thrilled to read <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/09/how-the-great-gatsby-explains-trump/562673/">Rosa Inocencio Smith’s recent, brilliant piece in <i>The Atlantic</i></a>, which addresses many of the issues with which we have been grappling. In “How <i>The Great Gatsby </i>Explains Trump,” <b>Smith reads the novel as “a surprisingly apt primer on the [current] president of the United States.”</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>In her accessible and engagingly written (and highly teachable) article, </b>Smith explores both the superficial and deep connections between Tom Buchanan and Trump and argues that <i>Gatsby</i>, as a story about power under threat, can be read as a “warning” of how power “can render truth irrelevant.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>As Smith details, <i>all </i>the main characters in <i>Gatsby</i>, not just Tom, use their wealth and power to assert a kind of deceitful privilege in the world. </b>Jordan cheats at golf. Nick buys a financial practice to start a new life, leaving the Midwest and a “tangle” of a relationship behind. Daisy, with her “voice full of money,” rarely, as Smith notes, “says anything she means.” As Nick notes, it’s almost as if Daisy and Tom belong to a “distinguished secret society,” in which power, not truth, is the real currency.<o:p></o:p><br />
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For Smith, the <b>key warning in <i>Gatsby </i>is not simply Tom’s “carelessness about truth and consequences,” but the ways in which that carelessness infects and is mirrored in so many of the other characters in the novel. </b>Tom, then, like Trump, exposes the “gaps in America’s ideal of itself – the ugly currents of its power, the limits of its possibilities.” The disconnect in <i>Gatsby </i>between truth and power is underscored in the injustice of the novel’s closing: Nick can only shake Tom’s hand and muse that “There was nothing I could say except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Closely linked to Smith’s discussion of power and privilege in <i>Gatsby </i>and Trump is a fascinating discussion by Paul Krugman in <i>The New York Times</i>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/opinion/kavanaugh-white-male-privilege.html">“The Angry White Male Caucus.”</a></b> Krugman argues that Trump’s and Brett Kavanaugh’s white male anger represents a “sort of high-end resentment, the anger of highly-privileged people who nonetheless feel that they aren’t privileged enough or that their privileges might be eroded by social change.” Doesn’t this toxic mix of privilege and anger also sound like Tom, a man of immense wealth who is unaccountably worried about the colored races taking over the world and who, in the course of the novel, comes to face his worst nightmare when he discovers that Mr. Nobody from Nowhere is sleeping with his wife?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Krugman places Kavanaugh’s (and Trump’s white male anger) squarely in the context of privilege, arguing that both men exemplify the “hard-partying sons of privilege who counted on their connections to insulate them from any consequences from their actions, up to and including behavior toward women.” Krugman suggests that that this kind of privilege is in fact under siege in the increasingly diverse United States and that “nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially … the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Of course, <i>Gatsby </i>makes clear that Tom is <i>not </i>subject to the same rules as the rest of us. </b>Gatsby, in the end, does not represent any threat to Tom; even the prize, Daisy, returns to her rightful position with Mr. Somebody. The status quo is maintained, albeit unsettlingly, within <i>Gatsby</i>, although the novel registers both the threat to and the rage of its Trumpian Tom.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>Those of us who teach in places where candid and open discussion of the current political scene is possible are lucky to be able to teach <i>Gatsby </i>in a moment where its relevance can infuse our teaching with the kind of purpose that is so critical in the classroom. </b>The connections between <i>Gatsby </i>and Trump underscore for us and our students why this text matters and how it enables critically important conversations. Smith’s article, for example, illustrates exactly how pertinent and revealing careful literary analysis can be beyond the English classroom.<o:p></o:p><br />
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<b>For those of us for whom such explicit discussions would be more dangerous </b>(and we know that ours is a difficult moment for academic freedom), it is worth remembering the vital work of opening up space in the classroom for conversations vis-à-vis the very traditional and canonical <i>Gatsby </i>about power, truth, privilege and xenophobia. Even when we don’t link these issues explicitly with Trump or Kavanaugh as part of our classroom conversations, <b>our thoughtful attention to the issues of power and its abuses in <i>Gatsby </i>can serve as a catalyst, provoking and allowing students to make their own connections in their writing or in their private conversations outside the classroom.</b><o:p></o:p><br />
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And while it may seem risky to engage in such difficult discussions in our classrooms, as we discussed with the <a href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/professional-development/events/">dedicated teachers we met at the NJCTE Fall Conference last weekend</a>, <b>it is far scarier to allow our students to leave our classrooms without having the opportunity to learn how to engage in the kinds of thoughtful, critical conversations that our democracy hinges upon.</b> If you share the same concerns and happen to be in Pennsylvania on October 19, please <a href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/professional-development/events/">join us at PCTELA to continue this conversation</a>.</div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-45551736856476090782018-09-16T11:31:00.000-07:002018-09-16T11:32:08.556-07:00Another source for Gatsby's "this man Goddard"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If you’ve been following <a href="https://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby">our work on <i>Gatsby</i></a>, you are probably already well aware of how often we write about Lothrop Stoddard, whose ideas are parroted by Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan as the work of “this man Goddard.”<br />
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<b>Goddard was Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote about the threat of the “colored races” to the white world and white world supremacy.</b> In his 1920 text, <i>The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy</i>, which Tom mis-cites as “The Rise of The Colored Empires,” Stoddard warns of the “influx of undesirable elements” and the devastation of “our race-heritage” because America has not been “reserved for the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times.” Tom rephrases Stoddard’s ideas: “if we don’t look out, the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. . . . It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”</div>
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Stoddard’s text is in public domain and accessible online, but critical, relevant excerpts are available in a classroom-ready format, accompanied by discussion and writing prompts and other teaching materials, in our recent volume, <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831016/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby" target="_blank">Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby</a></i>.<br />
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<b>We find the Stoddard text critical and compelling, not just in terms of understanding <i>Gatsby </i></b><b>but also in relation to the heightened rhetoric around immigration and nativism that has emerged under the Trump presidency.</b> Using Stoddard excerpts, in connection with a discussion of Tom’s discussion of the “Goddard,” allows an entry-point for these historically-specific ideas about white nationalism in the classroom (with or without explicit connection to the contemporary Trump context).<br />
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<b>Imagine our surprise and intellectual delight to discover there is even more to be made of Fitzgerald’s “Goddard.”</b><br />
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It turns out, as we learned recently from a delightful blog from <a href="https://museumhack.com/the-origin-of-the-moron/" target="_blank">Museum Hack</a> (a great organization that you should check out if you don’t already know about them), that <b>there was also a prominent Goddard in the early 20th century who, like Lothrop Stoddard, was focused on the dangers of immigrants.</b> Henry H. Goddard, a psychologist, was an intelligence researcher, who coined the term “moron” in order to categorize with more scientific precision those he considered cognitively disabled. Hmm. (Note – “moron” is no longer a scientifically precise or acceptable medical term.)</div>
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<b>In 1913, Goddard conducted tests of immigrants at Ellis Island. He studied Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and Russians.</b> His findings, “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” published in a journal called <i>The Journal of Delinquency</i> and <a href="https://museumhack.com/the-origin-of-the-moron/" target="_blank">accessible online</a>, outline the tests he performed and his conclusions: “that half of such a group of immigrants [is] feeble-minded.” While noting the seeming impossibility of his findings, he explains that this group “is of a decidedly different character from the earlier immigration … we are now getting the poorest of each race.”<br />
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And the poorest of each race are more likely to be feeble-minded? Apparently.</div>
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<b>For Goddard, the question is how best to treat these immigrants. </b>He concludes: “Morons as a class, if taken early and trained carefully and so kept from becoming vicious and criminal, could be successfully employed if the employer understands them . . . .”</div>
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Still, Goddard worries about the children of these morons, who will, as he concedes, be Americans. And so he ponders, “Shall we exclude the moron immigrants because they are likely to have moron children who will become troublesome citizens?”</div>
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<b>As Joella Straley <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/02/10/267561895/it-took-a-eugenicist-to-come-up-with-moron">writes on National Public Radio’s Code Switch</a>, the year after Goddard presented his findings, deportation numbers for “feeble-mindedness” doubled.</b></div>
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We have yet to uncover any evidence that Fitzgerald was aware of Henry H. Goddard and his eugenicist work, but the re-naming of Stoddard as Goddard is surely no coincidence.<br />
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Regardless, <b>a brief perusal of a few paragraphs of Goddard’s work, such as an excerpt from “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” can serve to underscore the anti-immigrant xenophobia of the world of </b><b>Gatsby</b> and the ways in which Tom (and Nick’s) racism and anti-Semitism form part of a broader landscape of nativism. An excerpt from Henry Goddard, then, could be easily put into dialogue with <i>Gatsby </i>and, <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831016/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby">using the discussion and writing prompts and multimedia links provided in our unit on Stoddard</a>, even more deeply complicate ours and our students’ understanding of Fitzgerald’s novel. </div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-82213437633489554432018-09-10T09:18:00.000-07:002018-09-16T11:32:16.386-07:00Revamp your Lord of the Flies unit with Prasad's Damselfly<div>
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If you are teaching William Golding’s <i>Lord of the Flies</i> this year, consider including <a href="http://www.chandraprasad.com/damselfly/" target="_blank">Chandra Prasad’s debut YA novel <i>Damselfly</i></a> as one of the texts in your unit. Yes, we usually talk about using informational text to teach literature, but <b>at the heart of our work is putting texts in dialogue and asking what voices or perspectives are missing from canonical works and common interpretations of them</b>.<i></i></div>
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In <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475820270/Connecting-Across-Disciplines-Collaborating-with-Informational-Text" target="_blank">our volume on cross-disciplinary collaboration</a>, we present a unit based on an excerpt from William Golding’s <i>Lord of the Flies</i> and a <i>New York Times</i> science article on the study of aggression in male fruit flies. <b>Our goal with that unit is to support students in using scientific knowledge to critically evaluate what Golding depicts in his novel and to develop their understanding of aggression and violence in the present day.</b></div>
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That said, like many other readers, we have some issues with <i>Lord of the Flies</i>, particularly its exclusive focus on very privileged white English boys. Indeed, when we wrote about the abovementioned texts <a href="https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/text-to-text-lord-of-the-flies-and-a-fight-club-for-flies/?_r=0" target="_blank">in a piece for the <i>New York Times Learning Network</i></a>, we included <b>links to additional pieces on bullying and aggression among girls that teachers and students could use to expand their discussion of such timely themes</b>.</div>
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<b>Prasad’s <i>Damselfly</i> is an engaging present-day take on Golding’s premise</b>, particularly because it eschews the easy artifice of switching the gender of a single-sex group of teens stranded on a remote island in the Pacific to female (as <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/08/31/an_all_female_lord_of_the_flies_remake_is_in_the_works.html" target="_blank">an upcoming and already widely criticized film adaptation of </a><i><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/08/31/an_all_female_lord_of_the_flies_remake_is_in_the_works.html" target="_blank">Lord of the Flies</a> </i>– written and directed by two men – is planned to do – and as Libba Bray’s YA novel <i>Beauty Queens</i> more imaginatively has done).</div>
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<b>Instead <i>Damselfly</i> intersects with and updates Golding’s plot</b>, presenting a mixed-gender, mixed-race, yet still privileged 21<sup>st</sup>-century group of American teenagers, the members of an elite private school’s fencing team, who had been on their way to a tournament in Japan when their plane crashed. After washing up on various parts of the island (implied to be the same island Golding’s boys crashed on), the survivors work together to build and acquire what they need to survive, but the social dynamics of their previous life and threats from an unseen fellow inhabitant of the island start to unravel their initially united resolve. </div>
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Prasad’s novel is in some ways more engaging than Golding’s because <b>she complicates the relationships between the teens by providing more backstory about them</b>, particularly the Indian-American narrator Samantha and her best friend Mel, who is white. While Samantha attends the elite Drake Rosemont and even plays on its fencing team, she does so only via a scholarship she won partly to help diversify the school’s student body, after applying to the boarding school to escape the dysfunction and abuse at home that she hides even from Mel.</div>
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<b>While readers might expect a battle of the sexes to be the primary source of conflict among the group, the most significant tensions fall along lines of race and class.</b> That said, timeless teenage anxieties over popularity, peer pressure, and attractiveness are definitely at play in the conflicts that underscore this engaging novel. But one of the most affecting aspects of <i>Damselfly </i>is an update Prasad makes to the <i>Lord of the Flies </i>character Simon in Anne Marie whose survival struggle on the island is also dramatically complicated by mental illness.</div>
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As these power struggles play out, Prasad’s characters express ideas and opinions about each other that <b>will provide ample fuel for students’ discussions about race, gender, class, disability</b>, and how these identities and differences factor into the dynamics of their own families and communities, as well as our society as a whole.</div>
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<b>Teachers could incorporate <i>Damselfly</i> into a <i>Lord of the Flies</i> unit in a variety of ways.</b> Excerpts from corresponding parts of each novel could be placed in direct dialogue with each other. Or, after a teacher-led study of <i>Lord of the Flies</i>, groups of students could take the lead in teaching <i>Damselfly</i>, <i>Beauty Queens</i> or <a href="http://www.william-golding.co.uk/film-adaptations-lord-flies" target="_blank">one of the film adaptations of Golding’s novel</a> and then critically comparing each version.</div>
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Adding something into our curriculum often sparks anxiety about having enough time. But <b>creating a cluster of texts around a canonical work that you love <i>or that you are required</i> to teach can reinvigorate both teacher and student interest</b> in a novel like <i>Lord of the </i>Flies and create a rich learning experience about timely themes that warrants and produces extended discussion and exploration.</div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-11725898237754269982018-08-08T07:35:00.001-07:002018-08-08T08:10:56.162-07:00Using informational text to revamp, disrupt, and recharge your curriculum<div style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px;">
<b style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Though we always welcome time to relax and recharge over the summer, our energy for the new school year starts revving up come August. </b><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">If you're thinking about revamping your curriculum and maybe even</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><a href="https://disrupttexts.org/" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" target="_blank">disrupting some of the texts</a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">(</span><a href="https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23DisruptTexts&src=typd" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: arial, sans-serif;" target="_blank">#DisruptTexts</a><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">) you've traditionally taught or inherited, our</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><i style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Using Informational Text</i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> series can help. (Disclaimer: We do not intend to claim credit for the great conversation started by <a href="https://twitter.com/triciaebarvia" target="_blank">@TriciaEbarvia</a> this summer; we are simply offering resources to help teachers engage in this important work.)</span></div>
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<b><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831016/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby" target="_blank">Our newest volume on The Great Gatsby</a> </b>offers classroom-ready units featuring nonfiction excerpts that support critical conversations with students around race, immigration, and inequality in connection with Fitzgerald's 1920s novel, which seems more relevant than ever in our present political and cultural climate. These readings, accompanied by vocabulary activities and guided reading and discussion prompts, <b>support student inquiry into essential questions like "Why Should We Care About Economic Inequality?" and "What Is Tom Buchanan Worried About--Is Civilization 'Going to Pieces'?" </b>If you'd like a preview of how to put present-day issues in dialogue with <i>Gatsby</i>, check out <a href="http://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">our recent blog posts on both the difficulties and enduring relevance of Fitzgerald’s classic novel</a>.</div>
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<b>Similarly, our volume on <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i></b> presents units that <a href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/series/sample-units/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">examine the relationship between Calpurnia and Scout</a>, <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475806816/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">question whether Atticus is a hero</a>, and help your students think critically about the characters and the complex world Harper Lee depicts (and even <a href="http://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/2018/01/teaching-students-to-read-against.html" style="color: #1155cc;">teach them to "read against" canonical works like <i>Mockingbird</i></a>).</div>
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<b>If you are teaching </b><i><b>A Raisin in the Sun</b></i>, <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475821543/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-A-Raisin-in-the-Sun" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">the second volume in our series</a> will help you underscore the enduring relevance of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play. In it, you will find ready-to-use units on housing discrimination past and present, the violence surrounding housing desegregation, the politics of African-American women’s hair, and more.<br />
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<b>If you are looking for ways to collaborate with your content-area colleagues around literacy,</b> check out <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475820270/Connecting-Across-Disciplines-Collaborating-with-Informational-Text" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank"><i>Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text</i></a>. This volume offers practical strategies for initiating cross-disciplinary collaboration and developing students’ disciplinary literacy skills, as well as a sample unit based on a science article and an excerpt from <i>Lord of the Flies.</i><br />
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<b>If you are thinking about how to revamp your curriculum in general, </b>our <a href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">website</a> and <a href="http://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">blog</a> <wbr></wbr>feature resources and strategies for finding great informational texts that relate to any literary work you may be teaching and using them successfully in your classroom. We also offer ideas for <a href="http://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/vocabulary" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">teaching key vocabulary in meaningful and engaging ways</a> and <a href="http://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/multimedia" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">using multimedia together with written informational texts</a>. Check out <a href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/teacher/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">our sample units based on </a><i><a href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/teacher/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Mockingbird </a></i>for models.<br />
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<b>If you’d like hands-on training in our approach to using informational text, </b><a href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/professional-development/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">contact us about scheduling a professional development session in your school or district</a>. We offer half-day and full-day workshops for both English and/or content-area teachers. <b>If you are in the NJ/PA area,</b> <a href="http://www.usinginformationaltext.com/professional-development/events/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">we look forward to seeing you</a> at NJCTE in September, PCTELA in October, or NJEA in November. <b>Otherwise, we hope to see you at NCTE and CEL in Houston!</b><br />
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<b>We hope our resources will help you create rewarding learning experiences for you and your students.</b> If you use any of our materials, please <a href="mailto:usinginfotext@gmail.com" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">send us your feedback</a>. We would also greatly appreciate it if you would post a review on <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7384088.Susan_Chenelle" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Goodreads</a> or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&text=Susan+Chenelle&search-alias=books&field-author=Susan+Chenelle&sort=relevancerank" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Amazon</a>. Thank you again for your interest and support!</div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-84705279207823651452018-07-22T10:15:00.000-07:002018-07-22T10:15:19.061-07:00Contextualizing Trump and Tom Buchanan's anti-immigrant sentiments<div>
During an interview with British newspaper The Sun while visiting England in July, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/07/13/trumps-comments-on-european-immigration-mirror-white-nationalist-rhetoric/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6aa395947f27" target="_blank">Donald Trump made the following comments about immigration</a>:</div>
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“Allowing the immigration to take place in Europe is a shame,” Trump said. “I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was and I don’t mean that in a positive way.</blockquote>
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“So I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad,” he continued. “I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago.”</blockquote>
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<b>Once again, Donald Trump is rehearsing the idea that white civilization is about to collapse and that “millions and millions” are coming to Europe (and the United States) to take over (and destroy) the culture.</b> These are the ideas that Lothrop Stoddard offered in 1920, warning of the threat to the white world and white world supremacy. In his <i>The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,</i> Stoddard warns of the “influx of undesirable elements” and the damage to “our race-heritage” because America has not been “reserved for the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times.” (Stoddard’s text is in public domain and accessible online, but critical, relevant excerpts are available in a classroom-ready format, accompanied by discussion and writing prompts and other teaching materials, in our recent volume, <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831016/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby" target="_blank">Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby</a></i>.)</div>
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<b>Tom Buchanan is the mouthpiece in <i>The Great Gatsby</i> of these white nationalist sentiments.</b> He spouts Stoddard’s nativist racist ideas (although he calls Stoddard by the name Goddard).</div>
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<b>But it’s worth noting, as part of a study of Fitzgerald’s novel and of Trump’s recent remarks, that the identity of the undesirables is not and has never been wholly stable. </b>Stoddard’s comment about Nordics is worth unpacking along with the complex racial identities of the characters within Gatsby. Many of the characters in Fitzgerald’s novel appear to students today as white, but whiteness in 1920 did not mean what it means today. Fitzgerald populates the characters at the margins of Gatsby with a range of non-Nordics, who would not have been considered white or desirable in this period.</div>
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The “gray, scrawny Italian child setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track” and the “young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the ashheaps,” for example, stand at a distance from Daisy and her beautiful “white girlhood.” So too does the Jewish Wolfsheim, whose undesirability is marked both by his profession in the novel as a gangster but also by his racialization – his big nose and his hairiness marking his Otherness.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And of course, a central moment in the text, when Nick meditates on the idea that “Anything can happen … anything at all …. Even Gatsby could happen” is undercut by its juxtaposition with Nick’s ghoulishly racialized description of “a limousine … driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl … the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Even Gatsby, who changes his name, is racially nebulous.</b> Tom’s accusations against Gatsby are not about the affair per se but about Gatsby’s undesirability. Gatsby is “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.” In the next breath, Tom compares the affair to “intermarriage between black and white.” And while Jordan assures Tom (and the reader?) that “We’re all white here,” the unnamed epithet, the “obscene word,” left on a piece of brick at Gatsby’s house hints that perhaps Jordan was wrong.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b><i>Gatsby</i>, after all, is a novel that meditates on exactly Trump’s fears. </b>White culture, a culture of outsized wealth, privilege, entitlement, and abuse, seems under siege to Tom. And perhaps he is right. Gatsby is able to infiltrate Tom’s world, however briefly, and capture Daisy, the icon of white womanhood.</div>
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It’s worth reminding ourselves and our students, however, that few of us are the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times. Many of us would not have been considered by Jordan and her peers to be white in 1920.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The Greek Michaelis and the Italian child, alongside the African-American men and woman in the limousine, are part of the long history of immigrants and slaves who have come to the United States and shaped and reshaped the changing culture of our nation -- and in a positive way!</div>
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<b>Given that the vast majority of our students are not descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times</b> and instead are a part of the millions and millions who have moved around our globe and reshaped and reinvigorated our cultures both in Europe and the United States, <b>we owe it to our students to help them contextualize Trump’s and Tom’s rhetoric, to understand its implications for the past and the present, and to speak out.</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2897880110865543769.post-6820184139210170092018-06-26T21:28:00.000-07:002018-07-22T10:15:29.180-07:00Gatsby, Buchanan, and racial paranoia past and presentAs most of us turn away from our classrooms, the <b>difficult and troubling resonances with <i><a href="http://usinginformationaltext.blogspot.com/search/label/Gatsby" target="_blank">The Great Gatsby</a></i>, that consummate American novel, continue to come, fast and furious</b>.<br />
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This week, it’s <i>New York Times </i>columnist Charles Blow, in “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/opinion/america-white-extinction.html" target="_blank">White Extinction Anxiety</a>,” commenting on how Trump’s broader border policy, leaving aside the odiousness of family separation, reflects a panic about “a loss of white primacy.” <b>Blow places Trump’s concerns within the context of Pat Buchanan longstanding ideas about the threats to whiteness</b>, reflected in Buchanan’s <i>Suicide of a Superpower </i>(2011), his latest blog posts, and his comments on Laura Ingraham’s show.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Here’s a brief snippet from <a href="http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-and-the-invasion-of-the-west-129497" target="_blank">Buchanan’s blog</a>:</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The existential question . . . remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization?</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">….</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western suicide.</span> </blockquote>
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If Europe does not act, its future is predictable.</span> </blockquote>
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The population of Africa, right across the Med, is anticipated to climb to 2.5 billion by midcentury. And by 2100, Africa will be home half of all the people of the planet.</span></blockquote>
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Africans taking over the planet: We aren’t in Wakanda.</div>
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<b>The idea that white civilization is about to collapse and that Africans are about to take over the world isn’t new. </b>Lothrop Stoddard offered the same idea in 1920, using the very same flood tide imagery to warn of the threats to the white world. In his <i>The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy</i>, Stoddard prophesizes: “Here is the truth of the matter: The white world to-day stands at the crossroads of life and death.” (Stoddard’s text is in public domain and accessible online, but critical, relevant excerpts are available in a classroom-ready format, accompanied by discussion and writing prompts and other teaching materials, in our recent volume, <i><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781475831016/Using-Informational-Text-to-Teach-The-Great-Gatsby" target="_blank">Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby</a></i>.)</div>
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<b>Like Buchanan, Stoddard worried that both Europe and America, the white homelands, were threatened by “oblivion in the dark ocean” of immigrants from “the colored world.” </b>Stoddard warns, “If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all.”<br />
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<b>F. Scott Fitzgerald picked up on Stoddard’s nativist racial paranoia and placed these noxious ideas in the mouth of his arrogant, abusive, philandering, millionaire, Tom Buchanan. </b>Tom argues the point, “violently”:</div>
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Civilization’s going to pieces . . . . Have you read “The Rise of the Colored Empires” by this man Goddard? . . . Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. . . . It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out of these other races will have control of things.</blockquote>
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<b>Nick Carraway, <i>Gatsby</i>’s narrator, dismisses Tom as “pathetic” in this moment. </b>We might be tempted to dismiss Stoddard and his ideological progeny, Buchanan, as equally pathetic.<br />
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<b>But can we afford Nick’s complacency?</b></div>
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Instead, we suggest that teachers of <i>Gatsby </i><b>seize this moment, both in our broader culture and in Fitzgerald’s uncannily timeless and prescient novel, to explore the racial paranoia and its bizarre coexistence </b><b>with extreme power and privilege</b>. September and <i>Gatsby </i>are right around the corner. Seize the moment to plan for what <a href="http://www2.ncte.org/blog/2018/06/say-face-teaching-learning-diverse-literature-empowerment-transformation-feeling-itchy/" target="_blank">Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich</a> calls “the real, and yes, uncomfortable and unpredictable work of teaching and learning.” These difficult but important classroom conversations will make your reading of a 1925 novel more relevant and revealing.</div>
Using Informational Texthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09824484425274646952noreply@blogger.com0